In this paper, we discuss TCP performance in a wireless overlay network where wireless LANs and cellular networks are integrated. In the overlay network, vertical handover, where a mobile node changes its access link during a session, is one of the most important technologies. When a vertical handover occurs, throughput performance of a TCP flow is degraded due to not only packet losses during the handover, but drastic change of its bandwidth-delay product. In this paper, we propose an ACK-pacing mechanism for TCP congestion control to improve the performance degradation. The proposed system is receiver-driven, so no modification is required to the mechanism of TCP sender. In the proposed system, a TCP receiver adjusts a transmission rate of ACKs according to the relationship between bandwidth-delay products before and after a handover. Since the ACK-clocking mechanism of TCP adjusts the transmission rate of TCP segments, the TCP receiver can seamlessly adjust its congestion window size to the new bandwidth-delay product. Computer simulation results show that the proposed system can improve the TCP performance during the vertical handover.

In wireless environment, TCP suffers from significant performance degradation due to bit errors on wireless link and handovers because it responds to all packet losses by invoking congestion control even though packet losses are not related to congestion. Several schemes have been proposed to improve the performance degradation due to each cause. They have been evaluated in a specific network environment where either bit errors or handover occurs, i.e. they do not occur at the same time. In this paper, we reveal the packet recovery mismatch problem in an environment where both of bit errors and handover can cause the performance degradation. We pick up one scenario that TCP traffic is transmitted in the situation that ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) and packet forwarding are implemented together. They are proposed to reduce the influence of bit errors and handover respectively and are natural approaches from the viewpoint of protocol layering. Computer simulation shows that in that scenario both techniques cannot perform efficiently due to interaction of each other. We also propose two buffer control approaches to resolve the packet recovery mismatch problem in our scenario according to applicability of cross-layer operation between layer 2 and layer 3.

In the mobile Internet, a handover brings significant performance degradation of TCP due to bursty packet losses during handover processing. In this paper, we propose a new bandwidth control for improving the TCP performance. In the proposed system, when a mobile node changes its accessing base station, an intermediate router suppresses an available bandwidth to the corresponding TCP flow. Because suppressing the bandwidth results in reducing mis-forwarded packets to the old base station, the bursty packet losses can be avoided. In the hierarchical mobile network structure, which is recently developed in order to realize micro-mobility protocol, all packets transferred to mobile nodes are converged to several gateways such as mobility anchor points (MAP) in hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). Therefore, the proposed system is suited to the hierarchical structure because it can be easily implemented at such gateways. Computer simulation results show that the proposed system can improve the TCP performance degradation especially in a situation where handovers frequently occur.