International Journal of Electrical and Computing Engineering

Vol. 1, Issue. 3, April 2015

ISSN (Online): 2349-8218

TCP Variants Performance Analysis in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Rajkiran K#1, Rakshith P Ram#2, Siddlingappagouda C Biradar #3
#1

Student, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Don Bosco Institute of technology,
Bangalore 560074, Karnataka, India.
#2
Student, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Don Bosco Institute of technology,
Bangalore 560074, Karnataka, India.
#3
Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Don Bosco Institute of technology,
Bangalore 560074, Karnataka, India.

AbstractIn wired network the dominating protocol which is

used for secured and reliable data transfer is nothing but the
transport layer protocol TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)
together with some other protocol in the protocol stack. Its
performance is best in wired networks but if the same protocol
is used in wireless networks then the performance reduces. In
this paper performance of the different TCP agents are
analyzed through network simulation for wireless network.
Results from simulation are used to conclude which is the
better clone in wireless mobile ad hoc networks.
Keywords-TCP, Newreno, Reno, Vegas, Mobile Ad Hoc Network,
NS2.

I. INTRODUCTION
In the present days the web packet data services for
applications such as e-mail, file transfer, web browsing etc.
are increasing highly. And as a result TCP [1] which is the
end to end routing protocol on the internet presently carrying
more than 92 percentage of the total packet traffic. It
provides a proper secure and reliable wireless or wired
connection between two sources in a multi-network scenario.
TCP agent appears in different clones (such as Newreno,
Reno, and Vegas etc.). All are with different advantages, but
with maximum throughput as its main objective. The
performance of a protocol for different network environment
and topology can effectively be evaluated through
simulation.
It has been analyzed that these TCP agents perform better in
traditional wired networks where as packet losses are mostly
caused by wireless network congestion. But the same clones
perform differently when applied to wireless network where
packet losses are due to different factors like movement of
nodes or delay in the acknowledgement due to motion etc. It
considers each packet loss as a part of congestion and
aggressively initiates the congestion control algorithm which
resulting in decrease in the link utilization and results into a
significant degradation in the performance in the form of
poor throughput. Different approaches are there to handle
these situations are present and are differentiated into three
different types [2] and some of them are worked in [3].
In this paper we have analyzed three different types of TCP
agents named Newreno, Reno, and Vegas. We have

compared and analyzed the results of these clones so as to

find out which is the best of these clones in wireless network.
The rest of the paper is divided as below. Section II provides
a work that is related recent research work carried out.
Section III gives the simulation scenarios. Simulation results
and comparative analysis of different techniques are
described in section IV. Section V provides the conclusion of
this paper. Future enhancements are mentioned in the last
section.
II. RELATED WORK
A. TCP Reno
This TCP Reno is built with the basic principle of TCP
Tahoe, such as start with slow and the coarse grain
retransmit timer. However it adds some intelligence over it
so that lost packets are identify earlier and the pipeline is not
emptied every time a packet is lost. Reno requires that we
receive immediate acknowledgement whenever a segment is
received. The logic behind this is that whenever we receive a
duplicate acknowledgment packet, then his duplicate
acknowledgment packets could have been received if the
next segment in sequence expected, has been delayed in the
network and the segments reached there out of order or else
that the packet is lost. If we receive a number of duplicate
acknowledgement packet then that means that sufficient time
have passed and even if the segment had taken a longer path,
it should have gotten to the receiver by now. There is a very
high probability that it was lost. So Reno suggests that an
algorithm called Fast Re-Transmit. Whenever we receive
three duplicate ACKs packets we take it as a sign that the
segment was lost, so we re-transmit the segment without
waiting for timeout.
Thus it manages to re-transmit the segment with the pipe
almost full. Another modification that reno makes is in that
after a packet loss, it does not reduce the congestion window
to 1. Since this empties the pipe. It enters into an algorithm
which we call Fast-Re-Transmit.
B. TCP Newreno
New reno is a quite change over tcp-reno. It is able to detect
many number of packet losses and as a result it is slightly
better that reno in the event of more packet losses. Like reno,

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Vol. 1, Issue. 3, April 2015
New-reno also enters into fast-retransmit when it gets many
duplicate packets, however it different from tcp reno in
which it doesnt exit fast-recovery until all the data packet
which was out standing at the time it entered fast recovery is
received. The fast-recovery phase proceeds as in Reno,
however when a few ACK packets are received then we have
two types of cases:
1)If it ACKs all the segments which were
outstanding when we entered fast recovery then it exits
fast recovery and sets CWD to threshold value and
continues congestion avoidance like Tahoe.
2) If the ACK is a partial ACK then it deduces that
the next segment which is in the line was lost and it retransmits that segment and sets the number of duplicate
ACKS received to zero. It exits Fast recovery when all
the data in the window is acknowledged.
C. TCP Vegas
TCP Vegas is one among TCP implementation which is a
modified version of TCP reno. It built based on the fact that
proactive measure to encounter congestion is much more
efficient than reactive protocol. It tried to get around the
problem of coarse grain timeouts by suggesting an
algorithm which checks for timeouts at a very efficient
schedule. Also it overcomes the problem of duplicate
acknowledgements packets to detect a packet loss, and it
also suggests a change slow start algorithm which avoids
from congesting the wireless network. The three major
changes induced by TCP Vegas are:
New Re-Transmission Mechanism: TCP Vegas extend on
the re-transmission mechanism of reno. It keeps track of
when each segment was sent and it also calculates an
estimate of the RTT by keeping track of how long it takes
for the acknowledgment to get back.
Congestion avoidance: TCP Vegas is different from all the
other implementation in its behavior during congestion
avoidance. It does not use the loss of segment to signal that
there is congestion. It determines congestion by a decrease
in sending rate as compared to the expected rate, as result of
large queues building up in the routers. It uses a variation of
Wang and crow crofts Tri-S scheme.
Modified Slow-start: TCP Vegas differs from the other
algorithms during its slow-start phase. The reason for this
modification is that when a connection first starts it has no
idea of the available bandwidth and it is possible that during
exponential increase it over shoots the bandwidth by a big
amount and thus induces congestion. To this end Vegas
increases exponentially only every other RTT, between that
it calculates the actual sending through put to the expected
and when the difference goes above a certain threshold it
exits slow start and enters the congestion avoidance phase.
III. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
We have used the open source discrete event network
simulator ns-2[8], in order to simulate the various TCP
variants. The latest version used for creating a wireless

ISSN (Online): 2349-8218

network is ns allinone-2.35. In simulation environment study

we have used around 10 nodes and simulation time is 150
seconds. Nodes were arranged in a 200 X 200 mm grid. We
have used Omni-directional antenna and AODV routing
protocol [9].
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND COMPARISON
A. Number of Mobile Nodes vs Throughput
We have measured the throughput by changing the number
of mobile nodes. The goodput parameter is considered actual
throughput of the link. The goodput is the application level
throughput, i.e. the number of useful information bits,
delivered by the network to a certain destination, per unit of
time. The amount of data considered excludes protocol
overhead bits as well as retransmitted data packets. This is
related to the amount of time from the first bit of the first
packet is sent (or delivered) until the last bit of the last
packet is delivered.
For example, if a file is transferred, the goodput that the
user experiences corresponds to the file size in bits divided
by the file transfer time. The goodput is always lower than
the throughput (the gross bit rate that is transferred
physically), which generally is lower than network access
connection speed (the channel capacity or bandwidth).
Fig. 1 shows the throughput measured for all the three
clones. And it is observed that Newreno has the greater
throughput than others. Throughput also depends on various
simulation factors like how fast the node moves (here we
have taken 15m/s) and where is the position of the node after
movement.

Fig. 1. Number of Mobile Nodes vs. Throughput

B. Number of Mobile Nodes vs End-to-End Delay
The average end-to-end delay of data packets is the
interval between the data packet generation time and the
time when the last bit arrives at the destination.

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Vol. 1, Issue. 3, April 2015
We have measured the end-to-end delay in the network
through simulation by changing the number of mobile
nodes. As shown in the Fig. 2 Newreno has the highest endto-end delay compared to others. Vegas is the best one
which takes less end-to-end delay.

Fig. 2. Number of Mobile Nodes vs. End-to-End Delay

C. Number of Mobile Nodes vs Packet Delivery Ratio
The ratio of the number of packets originated by the
application layer sources to the number of packets
successfully delivered to their sink at the final destination. s
From the Fig. 3 it is clear that the performance of Vegas is
best among the three other clones of TCP. It is very
important factor since it decides that even in large networks
how fast the packets are delivered to the destination from the
source.

technology in a better stage. Many researches activities are

going on this field. We found the performance of three types
of TCP agent variants; they are TCP Reno, TCP Newreno
and TCP Vegas. After comparing and analyzing the
performance from simulated data and its graphs is obtained,
in which we found that TCP Vegas is better than the other
two TCP agents for sending data packets and information
due to its better Packet Delivery Fraction and Average. endto- end delay. This is due to fine tuning of congestion
window size by taking into consideration the RTT of a
packet, whereas other reactive protocols like TCP Reno and
Newreno continue to increase their window size until packet
loss is detected. We have given the detailed behavior of all
these variants of TCP under various different scenarios. We
can come to the conclusion that the simulation results will be
of some use in future research study in this area helping the
growing interest and resulting in the required protocol for
todays high demanding world.
As a future work of this project we are currently working on
these following areas:
1) Increasing the type of analysis by considering
other new TCP agents like TCP Tahoe, TCP Sack, TCP
Fack, etc
2) Considering more performance metrics like
Routing Overhead, Total number of dropped packets
etc.
3) A new TCP variant can be proposed which
overcomes the drawbacks of other TCP clones.
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Fig. 3. Number of Mobile Nodes vs. Packet Delivery

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V. CONCUSION AND FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

We all know that nowadays wireless communication plays
important role in the field of communication. So it is
important to make the wireless communication and its

ISSN (Online): 2349-8218

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Vol. 1, Issue. 3, April 2015
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ISSN (Online): 2349-8218

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