Paper Review: Congestion Control in Wireless Environments

Reviewer: Mark Meras (mm446)

Main Contribution

This paper by Balakrishnan et al. discusses different techniques of improving the performance of TCP over wireless links. This is a review of current work and experiments on it.

Key Ideas

There are three main categories of techniques to improve end-to-end performance of TCP over wireless links: end-to-end, link-layer, and split-connection.
A link-layer solution aware of TCP (LL-TCP-AWARE) gives a 10-30% improvement over non-aware LL solutions.
The split-connection solution shields the user from losses, but is shown to not be required for good performance.
End-to-end schemes, such as the explicit loss notification scheme, are promising.

Critique of Contribution

This work is a good analysis of several options currently available for improving wireless performance. The paper will become more and more important as wireless links become ubiquitous. As the author argues, end-to-end solutions for the wireless link problem will likely be a growing area of research.