Mobile Transport Layer

Presented By – Nilesh Jadav

Traditional TCP Techniques
Congestion Control –
• Transport Layer Protocol is designed for fixed network with fixed end
systems.
• Data Transmission takes place using network adapters, fibre optics,
copper wires, special hardware for routing.
• If a packet is drop, while moving from sender to receiver, it is not
because of hardware or software errors.
• The probable reason for a packet loss is an overloaded system –
congestion.
• Congestion – The router has a packet buffers, continuously filling incoming packets, now the
router cannot forward the packets fast enough because the sum of the input rates of packets
is higher than the capacity of the output links.

• In such situation, router usually drop the packets.

• A drop packets is lost for the transmission and the receiver notices a gap in the packet stream.

• Receiver will not tell the sender, which packet is missing or lost, but continue to acknowledge
all packets in sequence.

• The sender eventually notices the missing acknowledgment for the lost packet, and assumes
the packet lost due to congestion.

• Retransmitting the missing packets on a full sending rate will increase the congestion – unwise
idea.
• To mitigate the problem of congestion, TCP slows down the
transmission rate dramatically.

• You think of UDP – but it is also not a good idea, as if you use UDP, then
it will give you a good throughput at the very beginning, however once
UDP is used by everyone, this advantage disappears – leads to UDP
Congestion (As everyone is using UDP).
Slow Start –
The behaviour TCP shows after the detection of congestion is called “SLOW
START”.

The sender always calculate a congestion window, for a receiver.

The start of the congestion window is one segment (Data at transport layer is
in - “Segments or one TCP Packet”). The sender sends one TCP Packet and
waits for the acknowledgment (ACK).

If this ACK arrives, the sender increases the congestion window by one, now
sending two packets, and waits for ACK.
• After arrival of the two corresponding ACK, the sender again adds 2 to
the congestion window. {1+2+4+…….}.
• This scheme doubles the congestion window every time the ACK come
back, we call it is exponential growth of the congestion window.
• It is too dangerous to double the congestion window each time you
receive ACK. This growth will stops at the congestion threshold.

• As soon congestion window reaches the threshold, transmission rate

becomes linear (by adding only 1) to the congestion window each time
you receive ACK.

• This linearity continues until a time-out at the sender occurs due to –

missing ACK, or sender finds a gap in transmission.

• In that conditions, TCP drastically drops to the 0, and starts sending single
segment.
Fast Retransmit/Fast Recovery

• When sender receives ACK, it informs that, Receiver got all packets.

• In TCP, receiver send ACK only if it receives any packets from the sender.

• Receiving ACK from a receiver also shows that the receiver continuously receives something
from the sender.

• The gap in the packet stream not always because of congestions, but due to transmission error.

• The sender has to retransmit the missing packets before the time expires.

• This behaviour is called fast Retransmit and to recover from any packet loss is known as Fast
Recovery.
Problem of TCP with Mobility (Implications
of Mobility)
• Error rates on a wireless links are higher in magnitude as compared to
fixed network.
• ARQ and FEC cannot just resolve the problem.
• There could still be some packets in transit to the old foreign agent,
while MN moves to the new foreign agent. The old foreign agent may
not be able to forward those packets to the new foreign agent.
• The TCP mechanism detecting missing ACK via time-outs, and
concluding the cause – congestion, but cannot distinguish the other
causes.
Classical TCP Improvements
Indirect TCP (I-TCP)
Two Problems that leads to the development of I-TCP.
• TCP Performs poorly together with wireless links.
• TCP within fixed network cannot be changed.
• I-TCP segments a TCP connection into a fixed part and a wireless part.
• Mobile Host connected with a wireless link and an access point to the wired internet, where
correspondent node/host resides.

• The Access point now terminates the standard TCP connection and act as a proxy.

• This means this access point is now seen as the mobile host for the fixed host and the fixed
host for the mobile host.

• Standard TCP is used between fixed computer and the access point.

• Between, the access point and mobile host, a special TCP adapted wireless link is used –
“Wireless TCP”.

• The access point (Foreign Agent) responsible for -

• Segmenting the connection between MN and CN.
• Mobility of MN
• Handover the connection to the next Foreign Agent
• CN never notices the wireless links or any segmentation of the
connection, as he is in fixed network, and changes are there in wireless
network.
• The Foreign Agent relay all data in both direction.
• If CN sends a packet and the Foreign Agent (FA) acknowledges this
packet and tries to forward the packet to the MN.
• If the MN receives the packet, it ACK the packet, however this ACK is
only used by FA.
• So, if any packet get lost on the wireless links due to any transmission
error, the CN would not notice this.
• In this case, FA tries to re transmit this packet to CN.
• Similarly, If the MN sends a packet, the FA ACK this packet and tries to
forward it to CN.
• If the packet is lost, on the wireless links, the MN again retransmit it to FA,
and again FA tries to forward it to CN.
• Packet loss in fixed network is handled by the FA.

Handover of a MN-
• After the handover, the old proxy must forward buffered data to the
new proxy (new FA).
• After the registration of MN with this new FA, this new FA can inform the
old one about its location, to enable packet forwarding.
• Besides, buffer data, the sockets of the proxy too must migrate to the
new FA.
• The sockets reflects the current state of the TCP connections such as -
sequence number, addresses, ports etc.
Snooping TCP
• One of the drawback of I-TCP is the segmentation of single TCP
connection into two TCP connections. This loses original end-end TCP
semantic.
• In this approach, the FA buffers all packets with destination Mobile
Host, and additionally ‘snoops’(investigate) the packet flow in both
the direction to recognize ACK.
• The reason of buffering packets, is to enable FA to perform local
retransmission in case of packet loss on wireless link.
• FA buffers every packet until it receives an ACK from Mobile host,
within a certain amount of time.
• In case of packet loss, or ACK lost, the FA retransmit the packet directly
to the Mobile Host from its buffer, performing much faster
retransmission.
• FA will never ACK data to the Correspondent host (CH). However, the
FA can filter the duplicate ACK to avoid unnecessary retransmission of
data from the CH.
• If the FA crashes, the time-out of the CH still works, and triggers a
retransmission.
Advantage :

• End to End TCP Semantic is preserved.

• CH does not need to be changed, as most of the work is done by FA.
• No fast migration needed of State and Socket to new FA. (Time –out occurs and
CH automatically understands the retransmission to new COA of MH.)

Disadvantage:

• Does not fully isolate wireless link errors from the fixed network.
• Mobile host must be modified to handle NACKs for reverse (mobile to fixed)
traffic.
• Cannot snoop encrypted datagrams
Mobile TCP
• When dealing with mobility, dropping of packet due to handover is
not only the problem, frequent disconnection is also one of the
problem.
• In such cases the solution is to retransmit the packets, however, the
retransmission when the connection is disconnected is again a
problematic situation.
• What happen if we are using I-TCP and a MH gets disconnected, the
proxy (FA) has to buffer more and more data, so the longer the
disconnection to more buffer it needs (as MH is disconnected, FA
cannot forward packet to the MH, so it buffers).
• M-TCP wants to improve –

• Overall Throughput
• Lower the delay
• Maintain end-to-end semantics
• More efficient Handover.
• Deals with frequent disconnections.

• M-TCP splits the TCP connection into two parts as I-TCP does.
• An unmodified TCP is used on the Standard host-supervisory Host (SH)
connection, while an optimized TCP is used on the SH-MH (Supervisory –
Mobile Host).
• The SH is very similar to FA in I-TCP, it again acts as a proxy and exchange the
data between both parts.
• If a packet is lost on the wireless link, it has to be retransmitted by the
original sender, hence maintain the end-end semantics.
• The SH monitors all packets sent to the MH and ACK returned from the
MH.
• If SH does not receive an ACK for some time., it assumes that MH is
disconnected.
• It then chokes the sender, by setting the sender’s window size to 0.
(Remember Slow Start, please refer slow start from this ppt.)

• When sender’s window size= 0 -- > Persistent mode. This means

sender will not try any retransmission.

• As soon as, MH again gets connectivity, it reopens the window of the

sender to the old value (before persistent mode).

• The sender can now continue sending at full speed.

Transmission/Time-Out Freezing
• While the approaches presented so far can handle short interruptions
of connection, some solutions are also imposed to handle longer
interruptions of transmission. (Such as disconnection in a car driving
into a tunnel, or battery drain out).
• The reaction of TCP is above situation is disconnection after a time
out.
• The MAC layer has already noticed the connection problems, before
the connection is actually interrupted.
• Additionally, MAC layer exactly know the real reason and doesn’t not
assumes “congestion” as TCP would.
• MAC layer informs the TCP layer of an upcoming loss of connection, TCP
can now stop sending and ‘freezes’ the current state of the its
congestion window.
• If the MAC layer notice this upcoming interruptions early enough, then
he will inform the MH and CH. Otherwise, the CH assumes the
congestion and breaks the connection.
• As soon as the MAC layer detects the connectivity again, it signals the
TCP that it can resume the operation at the same point, where it had
been forced to stop.
Selective Retransmission
• Go back and Selective …. Refer GTU Notes
Transaction Oriented TCP
• Assume an Application running on the mobile host that sends short
request to a server from time to time, which responds with a short
messages.
• In this case, if an application requires reliable transport of the packets,
it may use TCP.
• Using TCP, TCP uses a three way hand-shake to establish the
connection.
• Atleast one additional packet is usually needed for transmission of the
request, and requires three more packets to close the connection via
three way handshake.
• But here you can see, just for one data packet, TCP need seven packets
altogether (connection establishment + data + Connection Release).
• This is an overhead, think about the case, where GPRS uses TCP then,
there are certain delay every time you access any web service, as web
services are based on HTTP and HTTP based on TCP.
• To resolve this overhead, Transaction-Oriented TCP is developed. T-
TCP combines the packet for connection establishment and connection
release with user data packets.
• This reduces the number of packets down to two instead of seven.