TCP CAE: An improved congestion control using comparative ACK-based estimator

TCP receivers deliver ACK packets to senders for reliable end-to-end transfer. However, due to network congestion in the backward direction, ACK packets may not be successfully transferred, which causes the degradation of TCP performance. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a reverse congestion warning mechanism and a congestion handling mechanism in heterogeneous networks with heavy background traffic in the backward direction. In the proposed scheme, senders detect the reverse direction congestion and execute an exponential backoff algorithm in advance instead of waiting for RTO expiration. According to the simulation results using the NS-2 network simulator, the proposed scheme shows a performance elevation of 20% than Reno, 150% than New Reno, and 450% than Westwood, respectively, under heterogeneous networks and that the error rate of the radio link is 1% when the backward network is congested.