SELECTIVE SLOW START: A SIMPLE ALGORITHM FOR IMPROVING ‘TCP PERFORMANCE IN WIRELESS ATM ENVIRONMENT Upkar Varshney Computer Information Sciences Washburn University of Topeka ‘Topeka, KS E-mail: zzvars@ace.wuace.edu ABSTRACT Mobile computing has emerged as an area of significant research and development activities. To support this computing on move, one approach taken by ‘several researchers involves the introduction of the ATM technology in wireless environment (termed wireless ATM) and the use a suitable transport protocol to support various applications. It is likely that initial implementations will employ TCP (or a modified version of it) as the transport protocol due to the tremendous support it enjoys in the research community. However, the problem with existing versions of TCP is lack of differentiation between segment loss due 10 the network congestion and due to the handoff in wireless network. Afier a segment loss, TCP would initiate a slow start phase to reduce its offered traffic assuming that the network is going through congestion. This may reduce the TCP throughput significantly and will lead to unacceptable performance specially if underlying wireless ATM network is capable of supporting high data rates. This paper proposes a new algorithm called ‘Selective Slow Start’, where TCP will attempt to differentiate between segment losses due 10 the network ‘congestion and due o the handoffs based on the pattern of losses (timeouts). It will initiate slow start phase in the former case and it will continue to transmit at its current speed in the later case. Based on the simulation results presented in this paper, SSS algorithm improves transport layer throughput ‘significantly in wireless ATM environment. 1 INTRODUCTION Mobile computing has emerged as an area of significant research and development activities. One way to support mobile computing is to introduce the ATM technology in wireless environment (termed wireless ATM) and use a suitable transport protocol to support various applications. The trnsport protocol, for such an environment must be able to deal with reliable (wireline ATM) and unreliable (wireless ATM) parts of an intemetwork. It is not clear whether or not the AALs (ATM Adaptation Layers) can be treated as transport layer. For example, AAL 5 is functionally similar to UDP, a transport protocol, but none of the AALs provide any reliable end-to-end service [14]. It appears This work is 50 i ‘By @ Major Research Grant Grant M08 Var) trom Washburn University of Topeka. 0-7803-4249-6197/$10.00 © 1997 IEEE that some transport protocol needs to used on top of ATM to support various applications. The transport protocol to be employed is likely to be TCP or a modified version of TCP. This view of the author is also supported by the fact that TCP has enjoyed tremendous support within the academic research community [14] ‘The problem with TCP is that it can not differentiate between packet loss due to congestion in the network or due to handoffs in wireless networks. After a packet loss, it reduces its data transfer speed by switching to slow start followed by congestion avoidance phase, This scheme is helpful for dealing with congestion in wireline network as the total traffic offered is reduced and thus congestion is alleviated. However, this slowing down makes it worse when the packet loss is due to the handoffs in wireless networks. In this paper an algorithm, termed as ‘Selective Slow Start’, is presented which will improve the TCP throughput by switching to slow start phase only if there is congestion otherwise will allow TCP to continue to transmit at the current rate ‘We assume an environment where base stations in wireless networks are connected directly to an ATM switch port using an interface unit or multiple stations are connected to a switch port based on the estimated traffic between ATM networks and wireless networks. ‘This configeration is shown in Figure 1. The ATM cell is assumed to be the unit of information transfer in the wireless networks, therefore all communication within the wireless network is also based on using ATM cells transmission on shared radio links, The actual media access control (MAC) protocol used to share the radio channels is not discussed here as this study is not influenced by a particular MAC protocol ‘Wireless network with hexagon cells and base stations ATM network Figure 1. The environment for this studyThe format of this paper is as follows. Issues in wireless ATM are presented in II. In section IIT, TCP and other work in this area is discussed. In section IV, Selective Slow Start, a simple scheme for improving the TCP throughput over wireless ATM is presented. Simulation based performance evaluation of TCP with and without SSS is presented in V. Finally, some concluding remarks are made in section VI, in the end. IL, ISSUES IN WIRELESS ATM e ATM technology is increasing being deployed and one such example is the use of ATM in the current Internet backbone. This proliferation of ATM in local and wide area environments has motivated researchers to introduce the ATM technology in wireless environment also [1,3,4, 10, 11, 15]. Other important factors behind this introduction’ are (a) to provide seamless interconnection between wireless and ATM networks, and (b) to support emerging mobile multimedia services. As shown in Figure 2, wireless ATM may lead toa more efficient implementation of protocol stacks as compared to using TCP over mobile IP & ATM. In wireless ATM networks, mobility management is implemented in ATM layer (or W-ATM layer) and ATM is treated as the network layer. In mobile IP over ‘ATM scenario, mobility is managed at network layer by mobile IP and'ATM is treated as the data link layer. Due to some inherent differences in ATM and wireless networks, the introduction of ATM in wireless environment presents many interesting challenges including. (@) maintaining an end-to-end ATM connection with user mobility, (b) improving transport protocol performance, (c) compensating packet (cell) loss over wireless links, (d) supporting quality of service, if needed by an application, and (€) reordering ATM cells at the receiver after a loss of sequencing in wireless ATM environment. A more detailed treatment of these and other related issues can be found in [16]. These challenges have generated a significant interest among researchers and many interesting solutions have been proposed (1-4, 7-11, 15] TcP TCP Mobile IP "AAL, AL, ATM Layer Wireless ATM Layer] Physical Layer Physical Layer ‘TCP over Mobile IP and ATM TCP overWireless ATM. Figure 2. Protocol Stacks for TCP IIL. TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL TCP is the most popular transport protocol and is widely used on the Internet, the single largest worldwide network (of networks), and on many other networks. It ‘was originally designed to provide a reliable end-to-end byte stream over an unreliable intemetwork by dynamically adopting to the properties of _ the intractrork and fo be robert in he cages of Eee firs Whenever a timeout occurs, TCP assumes that ‘congestion has caused the packet loss, and it initiates a slow start phase. This method has been found useful as the total offered traffic is reduced to alleviate the congestion. However, if there is any host mobility or part of the intemetwork consist of wireless network(s), handoff may also cause a packet loss. The TCP will sill assume that the loss is due to the congestion and will slow down. This reaction will just make the situation ‘worse and will lead to reduced TCP throughput. Some schemes have been proposed in the literature to deal with any mobility in the internetwork (2, 7, 12] and to improve TCP performance under _ wireless environment. These include (a) reducing the TCP window size andior reducing the time TCP takes to reach back to its original window size, (b) reducing the duration of handoffs and/or amount of packet loss during handoffs, (c) reducing the length of the pause in communication just after handoff by using a fine granularity timer, (d) reducing intermobility time (less frequent handoffs), and (e) improving — wireless channel's characteristics (by link level retransmission) Out of these, (a) requires reducing the window size, which is not desirable as high speed ATM network can support higher TCP throughput with a large TCP window. Proposal (d) may not be feasible as the cell size in wireless (cellular) networks is continuously reduced to support the increased demand for wireless services and (©) may not improve TCP throughput as the local link level transmission will compete with end-to-end TCP retransmissions. One of the key ideas used in these schemes is that the network layer can inform the transport layer of any undergoing mobility in the internetwork. This paper proposes a change in the way TCP reacts to timeouts (or packet loss) by introducing an algorithm called Selective Slow Start’, which attempts to differentiate between segment losses due to handoffs and due to network congestion. The SSS algorithm is designed for wireless ATM environment and does not require any mobility notification from the network layer to the ‘transport layer. It requires making changes only in transport layer as TCP needs to keep a log of packet losses, which are required in deciding the action taken by TCP. IV. SELECTIVE SLOW START Ideally TCP should slow down when there is a segment loss due to the congestion but should continue to (retransmit at the current rate if the loss is due to handoffs. in wireless network. Therefore, if TCP could somehow differentiate between these two types of losses, it could react differently to achieve higher throughput.Achieving higher throughput is also critical as part of the underlying network is an ATM (or wireless ATM) network capable of supporting high data rates. This study assumes that when congestion occurs and an ATM cell is lost, then switches will also drop rest of the ATM cells belonging to the same TCP segment [12], ‘The transmission of the rest of the TCP segment would waste network resources as the whole TCP segment would need to be retransmitted any way. This dropping reduces the amount of traffic present in the network and thus alleviates the congestion. Even if congestion persists, itis not likely to cause a loss of consecutive TCP. segments from the same source. However, number of lost segments during = handoff in wieiess. network could be anywhere from one to the entire window of segments. So it may be possible to differentiate between ‘segment losses due to handoffs in wireless networks and due to the congestion in ATM network based on the pattern of timeouts. Based on these observations, the author proposes a new and simple scheme called’ ‘Selective Slow Start’ ‘Under this scheme, TCP will initiate slow start only if the number of lost TCP segments in the last S attempts exceeds a limit, The reasoning bebind this algorithm is ) that handoffs will occur less frequently say one in 60 seconds, and will last for a small interval (of the order of 300 ms from [2]), therefore will cause a packet loss infrequently and the loss is likely to involve consecutive TCP segments, and (ii) if the congestion occurs it will last longer than the handoff duration and is likely to cause loss of several TCP segments in a given interval of time. To implement this idea as an algorithm, the TCP. needs to keep track of segment losses and the time of their loss. After a timeout, the TCP will check if the number of segments lost in the last S attempts including the current one, exceeds a limit. If it does, then TCP will assume that these losses have been caused by the network congestion and will initiate slow start. Otherwise, it will continue to transmit as its current speed as if nothing has happened by retransmitting the lost segment and using the same timer values. This reasoning is very similar to what TCP does after receiving multiple duplicate ACKs (it doesn't slow down). The ‘Selective Slow Start” algorithm is shown in Figure 3. The next issue is how to set the limit in Selective Slow Start. The limit must be set in a way that it can account for all packet losses in a handoff. The limit can be set as follows LIMIT = K * C * Ty / Seg Where C is the average number of bits transmitted per second by the TCP source, Th is the average handoff duration in seconds, Seg is the average TCP segment size for the connection, and K is the safety factor to compensate for peak values. If K is not used (or set as ), then the limit may be set to a value lower than actual number of lost segments during handoffs and will cause TCP to initiate slow start even when the loss is due to handoff. This could lead to a reduced TCP throughput. It may be possible to dynamically change the limit based on underlying network's parameters. It must also be noted here that the value of limit be chosen very carefully as a smaller value of limit can cause TCP to slow start even under handoff situation, while using a very large value can significantly "increase the congestion in wireline ATM network before TCP exceeds the limit and initiates slow start ALGORITHM SELECTIVE SLOW START £ IF TIMEOUT { COMPUTE N_LOSS; IF N_LOSS > LIMIT THEN { SLOW START!, N-Loss = ELSE { RETRANSMIT THE SEGMENT; USE THE SAME TIMER VALUE; ) , } COMPUTE N_LOSS N_LOSS = 0; SEARCH THE LOG FOR LOST SEGMENTS; ADD 1 TO N_LOSS FOR EVERY LOSS IN ; THE LAST STRANSMISSIONS; 1 or congestion avoidance depending on the current window sizes. Figure 3, Selective Slow Start Algorithm V. PERFORMANCE CONSIDERATIONS To evaluate TCP and SSS Performances, a simulation model was developed in SIMSCRIPT IL.5. ‘This model was run on a SUN workstation for various parameters, The throughput performances of TCP and ‘TCP with SSS are shown in Figure 4, When handoffs are very infrequent, TCP with and without SSS perform nearly the same, however as the frequency of handoff increases, the TCP throughput drops much faster than that of TCP with SSS. At very high handoff frequency (1 per second), which is representative of pico cells (as small as 10-20 meters) and fast moving mobile hosts, TCP throughput is close to zero. As the limit for SSS is increased, the throughput improves. However, after the limit is’ increased beyond 5, improvement is insignificant. Simulations were also run for different receiver window sizes and results are shown in Figure 5. The round-trip delay was assumed as 100 ms and handoffs arrived every 1000 ms (or IHT = 1 per sec). As the window size is increased beyond 256KB, ‘TCPthroughput stops rising and therefore making any increase in receiver window size ineffective. However, the throughput of TCP with SSS rises significantly (although not by the same factor as the rise in window size). The improvement in throughput beyond limit=5 was insignificant. Similar results were obtained for other values of round trip delays and handoff frequencies. TCPASSS (L=10) TCPISSS (L=3) TCP+SSS (L=2) RT elay=100ms ‘Segment=1024 Rwindow=IMB 00 02 04 06 08 10 Handoff Frequency (/sec) Figure 4. Throughput Vs Handoff Frequency 100000 TCPsSS$ (L=10) TOPASSS (L=5) TCPsSSS (L=2) 1000 100 © 1000 2000 3000 4000 s000 Receiver Window (KB) Figure 5. TCP Throughput vs Receiver Window VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH ‘To support mobile computing over wireless ATM, a transport protocol will be required to support end-to- end reliable service. Due to the tremendous support for ‘TCP in research community, it appears that the transport protocol would be TCP (or a modified version of it) ‘The problem with existing versions of TCP is that they can not differentiate between segment losses due to network congestion and due to handoffs. In both the TCP initiates slow start assuming network congestion. This may reduce the TCP throughput significantly and could lead to unacceptable performance specially if underlying network is capable of supporting high data rates. slow This paper proposes a new scheme called selective start, where TCP would attempt to differentiate between the two types of losses. It will initiate slow start only if finds that packet loss is due to network congestion, otherwise it will continue to transmit at its current speed. Simulation based performance evaluation ‘was presented in the paper and based on these results, sss improves TCP's throughput significantly. 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