Paper review: A Comparison of Mechanisms for Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Links

Reviewer: Jason Oh

  1. This paper attempts to evaluate different schemes to improve TCP over wireless networks.
  2. The main contribution of the paper is presenting new evaluations of existing protocols over wireless networks. This area is important because wireless networks are becoming increasingly common, and will become moreso in the coming years.
  3. This paper finds that end-to-end schemes provide significant performance gains without extensive support from intermediate nodes in the network. It also finds that splitting the end-to-end connection is not a prerequisite for good performance.
  4. The contribution of this paper comes in somewhere between 3 and 4 because, although the findings have significance for the growing use of wireless networks, the depth of analysis is somewhat modest.
  5. The methodology of this paper is evaluating various schemes of TCP and comparing the throughputs. The analyses are fairly convincing, and the conclusions follow closely from the demonstrated data.