A study of TCP performance and buffer occupancy over a fading wireless link

This paper presents a use of M/G/1 queuing theory to study the impact of fading, and also the benefits of link layer re-transmission mechanisms on the performance of the TCP protocol. Our results show that both TCP throughput and buffer occupancy are varying as a function of a speed of a mobile host, and TCP performance improves with higher vehicle speed. We also show that when the propagation delay in the wire-line network is large, link layer re-transmissions can significantly improve the TCP performance, though it also increases the buffer occupancy.