Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Tcp Hack: Tcp Header Checksum Option To Improve Performance Over Lossy Links, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Boon Peng Lee, Renjish Kumar, Jacob Lillykutty, Winston Seah, A. L. Ananda

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless networks have become increasingly common and an increasing number of devices are communicating with each other over lossy links. Unfortunately, TCP performs poorly over lossy links as it is unable to differentiate the loss due to packet corruption from that due to congestion. We present an extension to TCP which enables TCP to distinguish packet corruption from congestion in lossy environments resulting in improved performance. We refer to this extension as the HeAder ChecKsum option (HACK). We implemented our algorithm in the Linux kernel and performed various tests to determine its effectiveness. Our results have shown that HACK performs …