Experimental Analysis of a Transport Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks (TPA)

Many previous papers have pointed out that TCP performance in multi-hop ad hoc networks is not optimal. This is due to several TCP design principles that reflect the characteristics of wired networks dominant at the time when TCP was designed, but are not adequate for multi-hop ad hoc networks. For example, congestion phenomena in multi-hop networks are very different than in traditional wired networks, and route failures and route changes may be frequent events. To overcome these problems, in a previous work we presented a novel transport protocol - named TPA - specifically tailored to multi-hop ad hoc networks. In this paper we perform an experimental analysis of TPA in static multihop scenarios. Specifically, we compare TPA and TCP performance in a chain topology with different number of hops and traffic patterns. We also consider the effect of the routing protocol. Our experimental results show that TPA protocol outperforms TCP significantly both in terms of throughput and energy consumption.