Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Background: A Mobile Ad hoc Network is self-configuring and infrastructure less system or network for mobile devices. Unavailability of infrastructure is common in the situations like Military war fields, disaster relief, sensor networks and Wireless mesh network. The prime objective of this paper is to understand the behavior of different TCP implementations on various mobility models of MANET for selecting the best TCP. Methods: Adequate simulations and its analysis are must before practically implementing and commissioning any system. The simulations are carried out using network simulator and Bonn motion as simulation tools, which are very much effective tools in this kind of scenario creation. Different mobility patterns common in MANET were generated using the mentioned tools. Parameters chosen are majorly comparable with real networks of MANET. Findings: Each node in a MANET is permitted to move autonomously in any direction sand this way changes its connections to different nodes most of the time. In these kinds of networks, congestion occurs in any intermediate node when data packets travel from source to destination and they incur high packet loss and long delay, which causes the performance degradation of a network. Congestion control is an issue that is taken care at transport layer. So the efforts are made to analyze the performance of most reliable protocol of transport layer: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The congestion control algorithm was thoroughly studied for finding the scope of improvement for TCP in MANET. The experimental results show that TCP Westwood NR gives high performance in case of throughput and congestion window utilization with low latency because of its ability to calculate the available bandwidth in most of the scenarios. So it is the most suitable transport layer protocol for effective utilization of channel bandwidth in wireless/MANET scenario. Application/Improvements: TCP is inseparable part of File Transfer Protocol, Web browsing, remote login, e-mail and video conferencing. It uses Internet Protocol so it can seamlessly applicable over satellite networks. Westwood NR of TCP can be enhanced with its congestion control and filter implantation to achieve high performance in MANET.
Keywords: Bonn Motion, MANET: Mobile Ad hoc Network, Network Simulator 2, TCP: Transmission Control Protocol, UDP: User Datagram Protocol, Westwood NR