Analysis, simulation and implementation of wireless TCP flows with forward error correction

In this paper, we consider a communication link where the last hop is wireless, the congested router deploys RED queue management, and TCP is used as transport protocol over the end-to-end connection. The Poisson counter driven stochastic differential equation is employed to study the capacity of forward error correction (FEC) with link layer retransmission to hide losses over the wireless link to TCP in spite of the time-varying property of the wireless transmission channel. Both the analytical results of FEC with and without link layer retransmission show excellent agreement with those using NS-2 simulator. This method is proven to be effective in solving the problem of the wireless TCP with the congested RED router using link layer retransmission and FEC. Furthermore, we implement TCP with Reed-Solomon code in a test-bed. The experimental results are very close to the analytical results. The proposed analytical approach can be used to evaluate the performance and to choose the correct design parameters before deployment of wireless TCP with Reed-Solomon code.