Three-color marking with MLCN for cross-layer TCP congestion control in multihop mobile ad-hoc networks

This paper presents a three-color marking strategy with MAC layer contention notification (MLCN) for cross-layer TCP congestion control to achieve high throughput and low latency in a multi-hop mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Unlike most of the existing works, the proposed method features by a three-color marking and an estimation of backlog packets at a TCP sender. Adopting front the FECN (Forward Explicitly congestion control) technique, a router with three-color marking can timely report contention status to a TCP sender, which then estimates the number of in-flight packets to determine a proper congestion window size. Performance evaluation performed on NS-2 is mainly based on a dynamic topology. From the simulation results, we show that the proposed cross-layer scheme can adaptively control TCP congestion window to provide outstanding benefits in throughput and propagation delay as compared to the previous works.