Differentiating Congestive and Non-congestive Losses on TCP Endpoint

Packet loss in IP networks can be congestive due to IP interrupt queue overflow on the nodes, and non-congestive due to hardware failure, signal-fading or obstacles. Recognition of two types of losses can largely help TCP endpoints in making right decisions. In this paper we apply the Visualized IP-based Network Simulator (VINS) to characterize the key differences between congestive packet losses and that of due to link disruption, which is noncongestive and commonly seen in wireless networks. Based on the analyses, suggested improvements for wireless TCP endpoints are proposed on both kernel and application levels in terms of avoiding useless keep-alive probing and congestion window tuning, but re-routing and re-establishing new connections.