19-22:::Transport

protocol for Ad-Hoc

Chandra Prakash
LPU
 Objective
Introduction
Issues in Designing a Transport Layer Protocol for MANET
Designing Goals for TCP
Classification of Transport Layer Solutions
TCP Over Ad Hoc Wireless Networks,
Other Transport Layer Protocols for Ad Hoc Wireless
Networks

2
Introduction

Need of NEW Network Architecture

The community recognizes the need for change

Wireline-centric network design is obsolete

New network environments have emerged

Ad hoc, sensors, consumer-owned, delay-tolerant

New networking technologies have emerged

UWB, cooperative approaches, MIMO, directed antennas

3
Introduction

New Category of Networks

Tens of nodes, resource constrained, wireless
links, line powered (computers)

Tens of nodes, resource constrained, wireless

links, line powered (embedded devices)

Tens of nodes, resource constrained, wireless

links, charged every day (PDAs)

Hundreds of nodes, resource constrained,

unreliable wireless links (Sensors)
Thousands of nodes, highly resource constrained,
highly unreliable wireless links, low duty cycle
(smartdust)
4 Tens - thousands of nodes, Nano-sensors
 Introduction

A New Era Has Begun

New Machines

New Environments
Applications

New Networks
5
 Introduction

The Role of Networking is Central

Embedded
Sensor
Applications

Wireless
Networking

Embedded
Sensors
Systems

6
 Overview of
Transmission Control Protocol / Internet
Protocol
(TCP/IP)

7
 Internet Protocol (IP)

Packets may be delivered out-of-order

Packets may be lost

Packets may be duplicated

8
 TCP: A Brief Review
TCP: Transmission Control Protocol
Specified in 1974 (TCP Tahoe)
Data stream TCP packets
Reliable end-to-end connection
Reliable In-order packet delivery
Implements congestion avoidance and control
Reliability achieved by means of retransmissions if necessary
End-to-end semantics
Acknowledgements sent to TCP sender confirm delivery of data
received by TCP receiver
Ack for data sent only after data has reached receiver

9
 TCP:--- INTRODUCTION
One of the most popular and widely used end-to-end protocols
for the Internet today.

In routing Protocol, packets are relayed hop-by-hop toward

their destination.
TCP provides reliable end-to-end transmission of transport-level
segments from source to receiver.

Transport segments arrive in sequence and lost segments are recovered.

TCP provides flow and congestion control functions, in addition to

reliable transmission (i.e., through error recovery mechanisms).

10
 How does TCP work?
Establishes an end-to-end connection:
Acknowledgement based packet delivery
Assigns a congestion window Cw:
Initial value of Cw = 1 (packet)
If tx successful, congestion window doubled. Continues until
Cmax is reached
After Cw Cmax, Cw = Cw + 1
If timeout before ACK, TCP assumes congestion

11
 How does TCP work? (2)
TCP response to congestion is drastic:
A random backoff timer disables all transmissions for duration
of timer
Cw is set to 1
Cmax is set to Cmax / 2
Congestion window can become quite small for
successive packet losses.
Throughput falls dramatically as a result.

12
 TCP Flow Control
Provides reliable connected-oriented service.
A virtual circuit connection (VCC) must be established hop-by-
hop from the source to the destination prior to data transmission.

The source node transmits more and more data if acknowledgements

(ACKs) for previously transmitted segments are received successfully.
This regulation of traffic transmission in accordance with the congestion
state and connection quality is known as flow control.

Transmitting segments at a rate faster than what the receiver can

handle will result in receive buffer overflow and information loss.

How TCP detect a packet loss

Retransmission timeout (RTO)
Duplicate acknowledgements
13
 Detecting Packet Loss Using
Retransmission Timeout (RTO)

At any time, TCP sender sets retransmission timer for only

one packet

If acknowledgement for the timed packet is not received

before timer goes off, the packet is assumed to be lost

RTO dynamically calculated

14
 Window Based Flow Control
Sliding window protocol
Window size minimum of
receivers advertised window - determined by available buffer
space at the receiver
congestion window - determined by the sender, based on
feedback from the network

Senders window

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Acks received Not transmitted

15
 Window Based Flow Control
Congestion window size bounds the amount of data that can
be sent per round-trip time

Throughput <= W / RTT Senders window

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Ack 5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

16 Senders window
 Ideal Window Size
Ideal size = delay * bandwidth
delay-bandwidth product

What if window size < delay*bw ?

Inefficiency (wasted bandwidth)

What if > delay*bw ?

Queuing at intermediate routers
increased RTT due to queuing delays
Potentially, packet loss
17
 TCP Congestion Control
TCP congestion control consists of:
Slow start (SS),
Congestion avoidance (CA),
Fast retransmit/fast recovery.

The endpoint node concludes that congestion exists when an

increase in end-to-end delay is observed.

Retransmissions can further aggravate congestion since more

packets are injected into the network.

18
 Overview

Overview of TCP concepts

Conventional TCP: Tahoe, Reno, New-Reno
Sending rate is controlled by 34
32
Congestion
detected

Congestion window (cwnd): limits the # of 30

28
2

packets in flight 26
24

Congestion windows size

Slow-start threshold (ssthresh): when CA start 22 3
g
tio
n
es n c e 4
20 n a
Co oid Fast retransmit/
Loss detection 18
16
av
fast recovery
n
threshold tio
g es n c e
3 duplicate ACKs (faster, more efficient) 14
12
n
Co oid
av
a

Retransmission timer expires (slower, less

rt

rt
10

sta

sta
1 threshold
8

w
efficient)

Slo

Slo
6
4

Overview of congestion control mechanisms 2

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Slow-start phase: cwnd start from 1 and Time

increase exponentially Slow-start Congestion

avoidance
Congestion avoidance (CA): increase linearly
Fast19retransmit and fast recovery: Trigger by 3
duplicate ACKs
 Upon starting a connection, or restarting after a packet loss, the
congestion window (cwnd) size is set to one packet.
The TCP sender increases the cwnd size by one packet
upon receipt of an ACK, until the first sign of congestion
is detected.
Thereafter, backoff occurs and the window size is reduced to half
the current window size (down to a minimum of one segment).
The SS process then begins again gradually.
SS threshold is introduced, which changes the increment gradient
of segment transmission with respect to time
Each ACK received results in increasing the window by 1/cwnd-
size.
In summary, an additive increase (SS)/multiplicative decrease
20 (backoff) policy is used to avoid congestion in TCP.
 Congestion Avoidance and Control

Slow Start: cwnd grows exponentially with time during

slow start

When cwnd reaches slow-start threshold, congestion

avoidance is performed

Congestion avoidance: cwnd increases linearly with

time during congestion avoidance

Rate of increase could be lower if sender does not always have

data to send
21
 TCP congestion control

22
 Versions of TCP
TCP Reno
TCP Reno (RFC 2581) can manage a loss of at most one packet
from a single window of data
TCP Reno employs the SS and CA mechanisms.
The sender window size is increased until packet losses are
experienced. lost packets are detected earlier and the pipeline is not
emptied every time a packet is lost.

TCP Tahoe
Congestion avoidance in TCP Tahoe relies on setting the congestion
window (cwnd) size to half the current window size on timeout.
On each ACK for new data, the cwnd is increased by 1/cwnd.
23
Tahoe detects packet losses by timeouts.
 Versions of TCP
TCP Vegas
TCP Vegas is different from TCP Reno in the sense that:
a new retransmission mechanism is used,
an improved congestion avoidance mechanism that controls
buffer occupy, and
a modified slow start mechanism.

In TCP Vegas, all changes are confined to the sending end, and it
does not involve any changes to the TCP specification.

24
 Versions
TCP SACK
of TCP
TCP SACK (RFC 2018) enables to cope with a loss of more than one packet
by changing message structure (using TCP options)

TCP with selective acknowledgement (SACK) is an improvement over

the Positive ACK with retransmission (PAR) scheme or an extension of
TCP Reno
In PAR, the sender waits for an ACK from the receiver for each packet sent.

Upon successful reception of the ACK, the sender transmits the next packet.

If an ACK for a packet sent does not arrive within a predetermined timeout
period, the packet is retransmitted. While PAR is simple, it is not perfect.

Network congestion and delay can cause ACK replies to be delayed.

When this happens, the sender will time out and the last transmitted packet
will be resent again, resulting in duplicates. Note that PAR uses sequence
25
numbers to correctly associate packets with ACKs.
 TCP window-based selective repeat mechanism

26
 Problem over wireless network for
TCP
TCP was originally designed to work in fixed networks.
Error rates in wired network are quite low, TCP uses packet
loss as an indication of network congestion, and deals with
this effectively by adjustment to its congestion window.
The mobile multihop ad hoc environment brings fresh
challenges to TCP protocol due to its frequent change in
network topology, disconnections, variation in link capability,
and high error rate.

27
 In a wireless mobile ad hoc network, packet losses are
usually not caused by network congestion, but by the high
error rate from wireless medium and frequent
disconnections from mobility, resulting in backoff
mechanisms being in-appropriately invoked , thus reducing
network bandwidth utilization and increasing the delay for
connection restoration.
In addition, variation in link capability could cause asymmetric
links and delayed acknowledgment, which can affect congestion
window adjustment as well.
As a result, standard TCP flow control and congestion control
mechanisms do not work well in mobile ad hoc networks.

28
 Issues of TCP over MANETs
1. Induced traffic : due to traffic through neighboring links
2. Induced throughput unfairness
3. Separation of congestion control, reliability and flow
control
4. Power and bandwidth constraints
5. Misinterpretation of congestion
6. Completely decoupled transport layer
7. Dynamic topology

29
 Issues of TCP over MANETs
Lossy channels
High bit error rate

Path asymmetry
Bandwidth asymmetry
Loss rate asymmetry
The backward path is much more lossy than the forward path
It may produce bandwidth asymmetry
Route asymmetry
Due to lack of transmission power
Distinct paths for TCP data and TCP ACKs

30
 Issues of TCP over MANETs
Network partition
Due to node mobility and energy constrained operation
If disconnectivity > RTO
The TCP sender will trigger exponential backoff
Doubling the RTO
After the network is connected again, TCP is still in the backoff state
Routing failures
Very frequent events in MANETs
Due to node mobility and repeated transmission failure from link layer
contention
After route re-establishment TCP will face a brutal fluctuation in RTT
Power constraints
Power saving reducing the power consumption
31 Power control adjusting the transmission power of mobile nodes
 Issues of TCP over MANETs

TCP Congestion Control

TCP uses the occurrence of losses to detect congestion
In MANETs, random wireless errors and mobility serves as primary
contributor to losses as well as congestion
More than 80% of the losses in the network are due to link failures
Essentially, most losses in ad-hoc networks occur as a result of route failures
If TCP enters congestion control state because of packet losses
caused by random wireless errors and mobility, then the throughput
of TCP can be degraded significantly

32
 Problems Facing TCP in Wireless Ad Hoc
In ad hoc wireless networks, when a route is broken due to the mobility of
nodes in the route, a route reconstruction or reconfiguration procedure is
invoked.

A delay is incurred during this time when the route is repaired.

The TCP sender is unaware of this incident. Hence, it mistakes this delay of
ACK arrival, or the increase in RTT, as signs of network congestion.

Accepting this belief implies that the source node begins to reduce its
transmission window size and initiates SS, which significantly reduces
communication throughput performance unncessarily.

33
 Overview

Why does TCP fail in MANETs?

Specific problems are identified:
1. TCP misinterprets route failures as congestion
2. TCP misinterprets wireless errors as congestion
3. Intra-flow and inter-flow contention reduce throughput and
fairness
4. Delay spike causes TCP to invoke unnecessary
retransmissions
RTO too small unnecessary retransmissions.

5. Inefficiency due to the loss of retransmitted packet

When retransmitted packet is lost timer expires performance drops

34
 Specific problems of TCP over MANETs
1. TCP misinterprets route failures as congestion
Effects: Reduce sending rate
Buffered packets (Data and ACKs) at intermediate nodes are
dropped.
Sender encounters timeout.
Under prolonged disconnection, a series of timeouts may be
encountered.

2. TCP misinterprets wireless errors as congestion

Effects: Incorrect execution of congestion control
Performance drops.
Wireless channel is error-prone compared to wireline
Fading, interference, noise

35
 Specific problems of TCP over MANETs

3. Intra-flow and inter-flow contention

Effects: Increased delay, unpredictability, and unfairness.
Inter-flow contention: contention of nearby flows.
Intra-flow contention: between packets of the same flow
(e.g. forward data and reverse ACKs).
Wireline: only packet on same link compete

Two nearby flows

Data stream

ACKs stream

36
 Specific problems of TCP over MANETs
4. Delay spike causes TCP to invoke unnecessary
retransmissions
Effects: Performance drops and many unnecessary
retransmissions. [Ludwig & Katz]
Variability: Spikes are not uncommon here
Spikes throw off parameter estimation and tuning
RTO, window size, slow-start threshold

5.Inefficiency due to the loss of retransmitted packet

Effects: Performance drops significantly under high loss
environment (e.g. MANETs).
Losing a retransmitted packet hurts
TCP can recover from one loss (fast retransmission)
Wired networks: packet loss rate is low.
37Here, high packet loss makes the problem significant
 Problems Facing TCP in Wireless Last-Hop
Delays experienced at the wired and wireless links are
different, and this can affect TCP flow and congestion
control.
A wireless link over a cellular or wireless LAN is usually shared by
multiple devices. The link delay varies with time.
Wireless transmissions are subject to multipath fading and signal
jamming, which contribute to packet loss.
All these can affect the estimated round-trip time or timely
arrival of TCP ACK packets.
Hence, some provisions are needed to make TCP wireless-
aware so that it can adapt accordingly, without significantly affecting
communication performance.

38
 Indirect TCP
proposed to resolve the disconnection issues in a mobile Internet
environment where one of the links in a TCP connection is a wireless link.

In mobile IP, mobility is handled at the network layer, where packets are
tunneled from the home agent to the foreign agent when a mobile host
moves.

While this principle of tunnelling works for datagram flows, TCP flows will
be affected by mobility since TCP is an end-to-end protocol.
An endpoint is defined by a socket at the transport layer. A socket contains the
source and destination addresses, along with their port numbers.
Applications use these sockets to send and receive data. When a TCP connection is
established, it remains active until it is disconnected.

During the lifetime of a fixed host-to-mobile host TCP connection, the mobile host could
have moved to another location.
This breaks the connection and TCP has no way of handling such a change.
39
 Indirect TCP
I-TCP requires the transfer of connection states from one
mobile support router (MSR) to the other.
I-TCP partitions the mobile TCP connection into two
segments, namely:
A regular TCP connection segment between the fixed host
and MSR
A dynamic segment between the MSR and mobile host
In ITCP, the MSR has to perform some transport-layer
functions
To hand off a mobile TCP connection, I-TCP uses a socket
migration technique,

40
 TCP Snoop

Link-aware transport protocol for wireless last-hop networks.

Addresses packet loss issues due to the presence of wireless links.
Such losses cause TCP to back off and time out, resulting in poor
end-to-end communication performance.

With the help of a snoop agent present at the radio base station,
lost segments are detected and retransmitted locally, without
intervention by the sender.
last-hop round trip times are estimated.

The suppression of duplicate ACKs corresponding to wireless losses

from the TCP sender avoids unnecessary invocations of congestion
control procedures by the sender.

41
 TCP Snoop
For data flow from the mobile to a fixed host in the backbone wired
network, a mechanism known as Explicit Loss Notification
(ELN) is used.

ELN allows the decoupling of retransmissions from congestion

control.

At the base station, packets that were lost in a single transmission

window are detected and negative acknowledgments (NACKs) are
sent back to the mobile host.

The NACK implementation is similar to TCP SACK

42
 Solutions for TCP in MANETs
Various solutions present
Most solutions generally tackle a subset of the problem
Often, fixing one part of TCP breaks another part
Competing interests exist in the standards laid out by OSI

43
 Solution Topology

44
 Why focus on Transport layer protocol
based solutions?
We want to choose solutions which maintain close
connection to TCP
Upper layers in the OSI model affected by choice of
transport layer protocol
Modifications may affect interactions with the Internet
Alternative methods only useful for isolated networks
Incur min connection setup and connection maintenance
overheads.
To provide both reliable and unreliable connections as per
requirement of the application layer

45
 Approaches to TCP over Ad Hoc
1. TCP Feedback (TCP-F)
Introduced in 1998,
TCP-F allows the source to be informed of a route disconnection
as a result of node.
When a link in a route is broken, the upstream node that detects
the disconnection will send a Route Failure Notification (RFN)
message back to the source.
Upon receiving this message, the source enters SNOOZE state.

46
 TCP-F protocol state machine

47
 When the TCP source enters SNOOZE state, it performs the
following:
The source stops transmitting all data packets (i.e., be it new or
retransmitted data).

The source freezes all its timers, the current cwnd size, and values
of other state variables, such as the retransmission timer value.
The source then initiates a route failure timer, whose value will depend on the
worst-case route repair time.

When the route repair complete message is received, data

transmission will be resumed and all timers and state variables will
be restored.

48
 2. TCP-BuS
TCP with buffering capability and sequence information (TCP-BuS)
The TCP principle deals with end-to-end connections. However, an ad
hoc wireless connection comprises multiple wireless links.

Hence, trying to provide flow and congestion control at the source and
destination nodes is neither sufficient nor situable.

I-TCP breaks the TCP semantics by allowing the base station to

perform transport-layer functions, that is, a TCP connection is
now further broken into two segments.
This is necessary since the link between the base station and mobile
terminal is wireless and special treatment is needed.
If this "segment" model is further extended to an ad hoc wireless
connection, then flow and congestion control can be performed in the
49 same vein, but in a distributed fashion.
 Five enhancements introduced in TCP-BuS include:

Explicit notifications
Explicit notifications are used to differentiate between network congestion
and route failure as a result of mobility.
The node that detects a route disconnection sends an Explicit Route
Disconnection Notification (ERDN) message back to the source. The
source then stops transmission.
When the route reconfiguration or repair process is completed, an Explicit
Route Successful Notification (ERSN) message is sent back to the source
via the pivoting node

Extension of timeout values

It is necessary to account for the time needed for route reconfiguration or
repair.
In TCP-BuS, timeout values for buffered packets at the source and nodes along
50
the path to the pivoting node are doubled.
 TCP-BuS
Selective retransmission
In TCP, retransmission of lost packets on the path due to congestion
relies on a timeout mechanism

Avoidance of unnecessary requests for fast

retransmission

Reliable transmission of control messages

51
 TCP-BuS implements reliable transmission of control
messages through two possible approaches:

The source periodically sends PROBE messages to check if a

privoting node has successfully acquired a new partial path to the
destination.

Each intermediate node is responsible for sending an ERSN message

reliably to to its upstream node until it receives data packets.

52
 Sequence of events by TCP-BuS after a successful
route reconfiguration

53
54