An SDN-based true end-to-end TCP for wireless LAN

Segment losses due to intermittent connectivity and mobility lead to sub optimal performance of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This is due to the fact that segment loss is considered as a binary signal for triggering congestion control and retransmission mechanisms at the TCP sender. In wired networks, segments are dropped due to congestion at the routers and the strategy of taking missed acknowledgment as an implicit signal for congestion control performs well. However, in wireless networks, segment losses are primarily due to mobility and transmission errors. Unlike many previous efforts, this paper proposes the design and implementation of Software Defined Network (SDN) assisted TCP which does not require the wireless Access Points (APs) to be TCP-aware and preserves end to end semantics. Further, no changes are required to be done in TCP protocol implementation at the end-hosts. The proposed approach utilizes the programmability provided by the SDN paradigm to intelligently trigger the spurious timeout detection and response algorithms, already implemented in standard TCP. The proposed approach is compared with the standard TCP and SDN assisted Zero Window based approach on Linux kernels using virtual data-plane switches and APs provided by the Mininet-WiFi platform. The implementation results establish the applicability of the proposed approach.