Using Split TCP for Multimedia Applications Over Wirless Networks

Abstract

The rapid advancement in wireless communications and availability of powerful wireless devices are the main driving forces behind the emerging third generation (3G) wireless data networking technologies. Bringing multimedia applications from the Internet domain to the wireless devices is still a major challenge. On wired networks, it is widely accepted that UDP is the most commonly used transport protocol for the transfer of multimedia applications. Wireless networks differ from conventional wired networks. In this paper, we compare the performance of UDP and TCP over wireless networks based on important performance metrics. We show that UDP is not suitable for the transfer of multimedia applications on wireless networks, as its stability is highly not guaranteed. On the other hand, the delay associated with TCP's retransmissions is not small enough to sustain real-time communications with strict delay requirements. We propose using split TCP for the transfer of multimedia applications in networks with a wireless link. Our simulation results show that split TCP has a better QoS than standard TCP plus it maintains the reliability and stability of TCP. Moreover, split TCP provides backward compatibility with the existing wired network protocols, thus it does not require any modifications at the fixed hosts.