Internet Engineering Task Force                            G. Montenegro
INTERNET DRAFT                                    Sun Microsystems, Inc.
                                                              S. Dawkins
                                                         Nortel Networks
                                                                 M. Kojo
                                                  University of Helsinki
                                                               V. Magret
                                                                 Alcatel
                                                               N. Vaidya
                                                    Texas A&M University
                                                       February 26, 1998
                           Long Thin Networks
                    draft-montenegro-pilc-ltn-01.txt

Status of This Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance
   with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   This document is an individual submission to the Internet
   Engineering Task Force (IETF). Comments should be submitted to the
   authors or to the PILC mailing list at pilc@lerc.nasa.gov.

   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

   This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working
   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
   and its working groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
   months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
   at any time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
   reference material or to cite them other than as ``work in
   progress.''

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.


Abstract

   In view of the unpredictable and problematic nature of long thin
   networks (for example, wireless WANs), arriving at an optimized
   transport is a daunting task.  We have reviewed the existing



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   proposals along with future research items. Based on this
   overview, we also recommend mechanisms for implementation in long
   thin networks.

   Our goal is to identify a TCP that works for all users, including
   users of long thin networks. We started from the working
   recommendations of the IETF TCP Over Satellite Links (tcpsat)
   working group with this end in mind.

   We recognize that not every tcpsat recommendation will be required
   for long thin networks as well, and are working toward a set of
   TCP recommendations that are 'benign' in environments that do not
   require them.






































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          Table of Contents

1 Introduction ....................................................    4
   1.1 Architecture ...............................................    6
   1.2 Assumptions about the Radio Link ...........................    7
2 Should it be IP or Not?  ........................................    8
   2.1 Underlying Network Error Characteristics ...................    9
   2.2 Non-IP Alternatives ........................................   10
      2.2.1 WAP ...................................................   10
      2.2.2 Deploying Non-IP Alternatives .........................   10
   2.3 IP-based Alternatives ......................................   11
      2.3.1 Path MTU Discovery ....................................   11
      2.3.2 Non-TCP Proposals .....................................   11
3 The Case for TCP ................................................   12
4 Candidate Optimizations .........................................   13
   4.1 TCP: Current Mechanisms ....................................   13
      4.1.1 Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance ...................   13
      4.1.2 Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery .....................   14
   4.2 Connection Setup with T/TCP [RFC1397, RFC1644] .............   15
   4.3 Slow Start Proposals .......................................   15
      4.3.1 Larger Initial Window .................................   16
      4.3.2 Handling Acknowledgments During Slow Start ............   17
         4.3.2.1 ACK Counting .....................................   17
         4.3.2.2 ACK-every-segment ................................   17
      4.3.3 Terminating Slow Start ................................   18
   4.4 ACK Spacing ................................................   19
   4.5 Delayed Duplicate Acknowlegements ..........................   19
   4.6 Selective Acknowledgements [RFC2018] .......................   20
   4.7 Detecting Corruption Loss ..................................   20
      4.7.1 Without Explicit Notification .........................   20
      4.7.2 With Explicit Notifications ...........................   21
   4.8 Active Queue Management ....................................   22
   4.9 Scheduling Algorithms ......................................   23
   4.10 Split TCP and Performance-Enhancing Proxies (PEPs) ........   24
      4.10.1 Split TCP Approaches .................................   24
      4.10.2 Application Level Proxies ............................   27
      4.10.3 Snoop and its Derivatives ............................   28
      4.10.4 PEPs to handle Periods of Disconnection ..............   31
   4.11 Header Compression Alternatives ...........................   32
   4.12 IP Payload Compression ....................................   33
   4.13 TCP Control Block Interdependence [Touch97] ...............   33
5 Summary of Recommended Optimizations ............................   34
6 Conclusion ......................................................   36
7 Acknowledgements ................................................   36
8 References ......................................................   36
Authors' addresses ................................................   43





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1 Introduction

   Optimized wireless networking is one of the major hurdles that
   Mobile Computing must solve if it is to enable ubiquitous access
   to networking resources. However, current data networking
   protocols have been optimized primarily for wired networks.
   Wireless environments have very different characteristics in terms
   of latency, jitter, and error rate as compared to wired networks.
   Accordingly, traditional protocols are ill-suited to this medium.

   Mobile Wireless networks can be grouped in W-LANs (for example,
   802.11 compliant networks) and W-WANs (for example, CDPD [CDPD],
   Ricochet, CDMA [CDMA], PHS, DoCoMo, GSM [GSM] to name a few).
   W-WANs present the most serious challenge, given that the length
   of the wireless link (expressed as the delay*bandwidth product) is
   typically 4 to 5 times as long as that of its W-LAN counterparts.
   For example, for an 802.11 network, assuming the delay (round-trip
   time) is about 3 ms.  and the bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps, the
   delay*bandwidth product is 4500 bits. For a W-WAN such as
   Ricochet, a typical round-trip time may be around 500 ms. (the
   best is about 230 ms.), and the sustained bandwidth is about 24
   Kbps. This yields a delay*bandwidth product roughly equal to 1.5
   KB. In the near future, 3rd Generation wireless services will
   offer 384Kbps and more.  Assuming a 200 ms round-trip, the
   delay*bandwidth product in this case is 76.8 Kbits (9.6 KB). This
   value is larger than the default 8KB buffer space used by many TCP
   implementations. This means that, whereas for W-LANs the default
   buffer space is enough, future W-WANs will operate inefficiently
   (that is, they will not be able to fill the pipe) unless they
   override the default value. A 3rd Generation wireless service
   offering 2 Mbps with 200-millisecond latency requires a 50 KB
   buffer.

   Most importantly,  latency across a link adversely affects
   throughput. For example,  [MSMO97] derives an upper bound on TCP
   throughput. Indeed, the resultant expression is inversely related
   to the round-trip time.

   The long latencies also push the limits (and commonly transgress
   them) for what is acceptable to users of interactive
   applications.

   As a quick glance to our list of references will reveal, there is
   a wealth of proposals that attempt to solve the wireless
   networking problem. In this document, we survey the different
   solutions available or under investigation, and issue the
   corresponding recommendations.




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   There is a large body of work on the subject of improving TCP
   performance over satellite links. The documents under development
   by the tcpsat working group of the IETF [AGS98, ADGGHOSSTT98] are
   very relevant. In both cases, it is essential to start by
   improving the characteristics of the medium by using forward error
   correction (FEC) at the link layer to reduce the BER (bit error
   rate) from values as high as 10-3 to 10-6 or better. This makes
   the BER manageable. Once in this realm, retransmission schemes
   like ARQ (automatic repeat request) may be used to bring it down
   to zero. Notice that sometimes it may be desireable to forgo ARQ
   because of the additional delay it implies.  In particular, time
   sensitive traffic (video, audio) must be delivered within a
   certain time limit beyond which the data is obsolete. Exhaustive
   retransmissions in this case merely succeed in wasting time in
   order to deliver data that will be discarded once it arrives at
   its destination.  This indicates the desireability of augmenting
   the protocol stack implementation on devices such that the upper
   protocol layers can inform the link and MAC layer when to avoid
   such costly retransmission schemes.

   Networks that include satellite links are examples of "long fat
   networks" (LFNs or "elephants"). They are "long" networks because
   their round-trip time is quite high (for example, 0.5 sec and
   higher for geosynchronous satellites). Not all satellite links
   fall within the LFN regime. In particular, round-trip times in a
   low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellite network may be as little as a
   few milliseconds (and never extend beyond 160 to 200 ms). W-WANs
   share the "L" with LFNs. However, satellite networks are also
   "fat" in the sense that they may have high bandwidth. Satellite
   networks may often have a delay*bandwidth product above 64 KBytes,
   in which case they pose additional problems to TCP [TCPHP]. W-WANs
   do not generally exhibit this behavior. Accordingly, this document
   only deals with links that are "long thin pipes", and the networks
   that contain them: "long thin networks". We call these "LTNs".

   This document does not give an overview of the API used to access
   the underlying transport. We believe this is an orthogonal issue,
   even though some of the proposals below have been put forth
   assuming a given interface.  It is possible, for example, to
   support the traditional socket semantics without fully relying on
   TCP/IP transport [MOWGLI].

   Our focus is on the on-the-wire protocols. We try to include the
   most relevant ones and briefly (given that we provide the
   references needed for further study) mention their most salient
   points.





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1.1 Architecture

   One significant difference between LFNs and LTNs is that we assume
   the W-WAN link is the last hop to the end user. This allows us to
   assume that a single base station sees all packets transferred
   between the wireless mobile device and the rest of the Internet.
   This is only one of the topologies considered by the TCP Satellite
   community.

   Given our focus on mobile wireless applications, we only consider
   a very specific architecture that includes:

      - a wireless mobile device, connected via

      - a wireless link (which may, in fact comprise several hops at
        the link layer), to

      - a base station (sometimes referred to as an intermediate
        agent or node) connected via

      - a wireline link, which in turn interfaces with

      - the landline Internet and millions of legacy servers and web
        sites.

   Specifically, we are not as concerned with paths that include two
   wireless segments separated by a wired one. This may occur, for
   example, if one mobile device connects across its immediate
   wireless segment via a base station to the Internet, and then via
   a second wireless segment to another mobile device. Quite often,
   mobile devices connect to a legacy server on the wired Internet.

   Typically, the endpoints of the wireless segment are the base
   station and the mobile device. However, the latter may be a
   wireless router to a mobile network. This is also important and
   has applications in, for example, disaster recovery.

   Our target architecture has implications which concern the
   deployability of candidate solutions. In particular, an important
   requirement is that we cannot alter the networking stack on the
   legacy servers. It would be preferable to only change the
   networking stack at the base station, although changing it at the
   mobile devices is certainly an option and perhaps a necessity.

   We envision mobile devices that can use the wireless medium very
   efficiently, but overcome some of its traditional constraints.
   That is, full mobility implies that the devices have the
   flexibility and agility to use whichever happens to be the best



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   network connection available at any given point in time or space.
   Accordingly, devices could switch from a wired office LAN and hand
   over their ongoing connections to continue on, say, a wireless
   WAN. This type of agility also requires Mobile IP [RFC2002].

   NOTE: Must we replace "base station" with some other term (e.g.,
   LTN-edge device)? "Base station" is a good term when discussing
   W-LANs but a misleading one in almost all W-WAN environments.
   W-LANs, the wireless link is between mobile device and base
   station, but within a typical W-WAN infrastructure there are
   several wireline hops between the actual W-WAN base station and
   the W-WAN edge device that provides the connection point to the
   landline Internet. These "base stations" do not have an IP stack,
   so, for example, they cannot have a SNOOP module.


1.2 Assumptions about the Radio Link

   The system architecture described above assumes at most one
   wireless link (perhaps comprising more than one wireless hop).
   However, this is not enough to characterize a wireless link.
   Additional considerations are:

      - What are the error characteristics of the wireless medium?
        The link may present a higher BER than a wireline network due
        to burst errors and disconnections. The techniques below
        usually do not address all the types of errors. Accordingly,
        a complete solution should combine the best of all the
        proposals.  Nevertheless, in this document we are more
        concerned with (and give preference to solving) the most
        typical case: (1) higher BER due to random errors (which
        implies longer and more variable delays due to link-layer
        error corrections and retransmissions) rather than (2) an
        interruption in service due to a handoff or a disconnection.
        The latter are also important and we do include relevant
        proposals in this survey.

      - Is the wireless service datagram oriented, or is it a virtual
        circuit?  Currently, switched virtual circuits are more
        common, but packet networks are starting to appear, for
        example, Metricom's Starmode [CB96], CDPD [CDPD] and General
        Packet Radio Service (GPRS) [GPRS],[BW97] in GSM.









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      - What kind of reliability does the link provide? Wireless
        services typically retransmit a packet (frame) until it has
        been acknowledged by the target. They may allow the user to
        turn off this behavior. For example, GSM allows RLP [RLP]
        (Radio Link Protocol)  to be turned off.  Metricom has a
        similar "lightweight" mode. In GSM RLP, a frame is
        retransmitted until the maximum number of retransmissions
        (protocol parameter) is reached. What happens when this
        limit is reached is determined by the telecom operator: the
        physical link connection is either disconnected or a link
        reset is enforced where the sequence numbers are
        resynchronized and the transmit and receive buffers are
        flushed resulting in lost data. Some wireless services,
        like CDMA IS95-RLP [CDMA, Karn93], limit the latency on the
        wireless link by retransmitting a frame only a couple of
        times. This decreases the residual frame error rate
        significantly, but does not provide fully reliable link
        service.

      - Does the mobile device transmit and receive at the same
        time?  Doing so increases the cost of the electronics on the
        mobile device. Typically, this is not the case. We assume the
        typical case in this document.

      - Does the mobile device directly address more than one peer on
        the wireless link? Packets to each different peer may
        traverse spatially distinct wireless paths. Accordingly, the
        path to each peer may exhibit very different
        characteristics.  Quite commonly, the mobile device addresses
        only one peer (the base station) at any given point in time.
        When this is not the case, techniques such as Channel-State
        Dependent Packet Scheduling come into play (see the section
        "Packet Scheduling" below).


2 Should it be IP or Not?

   The first decision is whether to use IP as the underlying network
   protocol or not. In particular, some data protocols evolved from
   wireless telephony are not always -- though at times they may be
   -- layered on top of IP [MOWGLI, WAP]. These proposals are based
   on the concept of proxies that provide adaptation services between
   the wireless and wireline segments.

   This is a reasonable model for mobile devices that always
   communicate through the proxy. However, we expect many wireless
   mobile devices to utilize wireline networks whenever they are



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   available. This model closely follows current laptop usage
   patterns: devices typically utilize LANs, and only resort to
   dial-up access when "out of the office."

   For these devices, an architecture that assumes IP is the best
   approach, because it will be required for communications that do
   not traverse the base station (for example, upon reconnection to a
   W-LAN or a 10BaseT network at the office).


2.1 Underlying Network Error Characteristics

   Using IP as the underlying network protocol requires a certain
   (low) level of link robustness that is expected of wireless
   links.

   IP, and the protocols that are carried in IP packets, are
   protected end-to-end by checksums that are relatively weak
   [Stevens94, Paxson97] (and, in some cases, optional). For much
   of the Internet, these checksums are sufficient; in wireless
   environments, the error characteristics of the raw wireless link
   are much less robust than the rest of the end-to-end path.
   Hence for paths that include wireless links, exclusively relying
   on end-to-end mechanisms to detect and correct transmission
   errors is undesireable. These should be complemented by local
   link-level mechanisms. Otherwise, damaged IP packets are
   propagated through the network only to be discarded at the
   destination host. For example, intermediate routers are required
   to check the IP header checksum, but not the UDP or TCP
   checksums.  Accordingly, when the payload of an IP packet is
   corrupted, this is not detected until the packet arrives at its
   ultimate destination.

   A better approach is to use link-layer mechanisms such as FEC,
   retransmissions, and so on in order to improve the characteristics
   of the wireless link and present a much more reliable service to
   IP. This approach has been taken by CDPD, Ricochet and CDMA.

   This approach is roughly analogous to the successful deployment of
   Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), with robust framing and 16-bit
   checksumming, on wireline networks as a replacement for the Serial
   Line Interface Protocol (SLIP), with only a single framing byte
   and no checksumming.

   [AGS98] recommends the use of FEC in satellite environments.

   Notice that the link-layer could adapt its frame size to the
   prevalent BER.  It would perform its own fragmentation and



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   reassembly so that IP could still enjoy a large enough MTU size
   [LS98].

   A common concern for using IP as a transport is the header
   overhead it implies. Typically, the underlying link-layer
   appears as PPP [RFC1661] to the IP layer above. This allows for
   header compression schemes [IPHC, IPHC-RTP, IPHC-PPP] which
   greatly alleviate the problem.


2.2 Non-IP Alternatives

   A number of non-IP alternatives aimed at wireless environments
   have been proposed. One representative proposal is discussed
   here.


2.2.1 WAP

   The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) specifies an application
   framework and network protocols for wireless devices such as
   mobile telephones, pagers, and PDAs [WAP]. The architecture
   requires a proxy between the mobile device and the server. The WAP
   protocol stack is layered over a datagram transport service.  Such
   a service is provided by most wireless networks; for example,
   IS-136, GSM SMS/USSD, and UDP in IP networks like CDPD and GSM
   GPRS. The core of the WAP protocols is a binary HTTP/1.1 protocol
   with additional features such as header caching between requests
   and a shared state between client and server.


2.2.2 Deploying Non-IP Alternatives

   IP is such a fundamental element of the Internet that non-IP
   alternatives face substantial obstacles to deployment, because
   they do not exploit the IP infrastructure. Any non-IP alternative
   that is used to provide gatewayed access to the Internet must map
   between IP addresses and non-IP addresses, must terminate IP-level
   security at a gateway, and cannot use IP-oriented discovery
   protocols (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, Domain Name
   Services, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Service Location
   Protocol, etc.) without translation at a gateway.

   A further complexity occurs when a device supports both wireless
   and wireline operation. If the device uses IP for wireless
   operation, uninterrupted operation when the device is connected to
   a wireline network is possible (using Mobile IP). If a non-IP
   alternative is used, this switchover is more difficult to



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   accomplish.

   Non-IP alternatives face the burden of proof that IP is so
   ill-suited to a wireless environment that it is not a viable
   technology.


2.3 IP-based Alternatives

   Given its worldwide deployment, IP is an obvious choice for the
   underlying network technology. Optimizations implemented at this
   level benefit traditional Internet application protocols as well
   as new ones layered on top of IP or UDP.


2.3.1 Path MTU Discovery

   Path MTU discovery benefits any protocol built on top of IP. It
   allows a sender to determine what the maximum end-to-end
   transmission unit is to a given destination. Withouth Path MTU
   discovery, the default MTU size is 512. The benefits of using a
   larger MTU are:

      - Smaller ratio of header overhead to data

      - Allows TCP to grow its congestion window faster, since it
        increases in units of segments.

   Of course, for a given BER, a larger MTU has a correspondingly
   larger probability of error within any given segment. The BER may
   be reduced using lower level techniques like FEC and link-layer
   retransmissions. The issue is that now delays may become a problem
   due to the additional retransmissions, and the fact that packet
   transmission time increases with a larger MTU.

   [AGS98] recommends use of Path MTU Discovery in satellite
   environments.


2.3.2 Non-TCP Proposals

   Other proposals assume an underlying IP datagram service, and
   implement an optimized transport either directly on top of IP
   [NETBLT] or on top of UDP [MNCP]. Not relying on TCP is a bold
   move, given the wealth of experience and research related to it.
   It could be argued that the Internet has not collapsed because its
   main protocol, TCP, is very careful in how it uses the network,
   and generally treats it as a black box assuming all packet losses



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   are due to congestion and prudently backing off. This avoids
   further congestion.

   However, in the wireless medium, packet losses may also be due to
   corruption due to high BER, fading, and so on. Here, the right
   approach is to try harder, instead of backing off. Alternative
   transport protocols are:

      - NETBLT [NETBLT, RFC1986, RFC1030]

      - MNCP [MNCP]

      - ESRO [RFC2188]

      - RDP [RFC908, RFC1151]

      - VMTP [VMTP]


3 The Case for TCP

   This is one of the most hotly debated issues in the wireless
   arena. Here are some arguments against it:

      - It is generally recognized that TCP does not perform well in
        the presence of significant levels of non-congestion loss.
        TCP detractors argue that the wireless medium is one such
        case, and that it is hard enough to fix TCP. They argue that
        it is easier to start from scratch.

      - TCP has too much header overhead.

      - By the time the mechanisms are in place to fix it, TCP is
        very heavy, and ill-suited for use by lightweight, portable
        devices.

   and here are some in support of TCP:

      - It is preferrable to continue using the same protocol that
        the rest of the Internet uses for compatibility reasons. Any
        extensions specific to the wireless link may be negotiated.

      - Legacy mechanisms may be reused (for example congestion
        control)

      - Link-layer FEC and ARQ can reduce the BER such that any
        losses TCP does see are, in fact, caused by congestion (or a
        sustained interruption of link connectivity). Modern W-WAN



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        technologies do this (CDPD, US-TDMA, CDMA, GSM), thus
        improving TCP throughput.

      - Handoffs among different technologies are made possible by
        Mobile IP [RFC2002], but only if the same protocols, namely
        TCP/IP, are used throughout.

      - Given TCP's wealth of research and experience, alternative
        protocols are relatively immature, and the full implications
        of their widespread deployment not clearly understood.

    Overall, we feel that the performance of TCP over long-thin
    networks can be improved significantly. Mechanisms to do so are
    discussed in the next sections.


4 Candidate Optimizations

   There is a large volume of work on the subject of optimizing TCP
   for operation over wireless media. Even though satellite networks
   generally fall in the LFN regime, our current LTN focus has much
   to benefit from it.  For example, the work of the
   TCP-over-Satellite working group of the IETF has been extremely
   helpful in preparing this section [AGS98, ADGGHOSSTT98].


4.1 TCP: Current Mechanisms

   A TCP sender adapts its use of bandwidth based on feedback from
   the receiver. The high latency characteristic of LTNs implies that
   TCP's adaptation is correspondingly slower than on networks with
   shorter delays.  Delayed ACKs and small MTUs may slow adaptation
   even further.


4.1.1 Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance

   Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance [RFC2001, updated in
   TCPCONG] are essential the Internet's stability.  However there
   are two reasons why the wireless medium adversely affects them:

      - Whenever TCP's retransmission timer expires, the sender
        assumes that the network is congested and invokes slow
        start. This is why it is important to minimize the losses
        caused by corruption, leaving only those caused by
        congestion (as expected by TCP).

      - The sender increases its window based on the number of ACKs



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        received. Their rate of arrival, of course, is dependent on
        the RTT (round-trip-time) between sender and receiver,
        which implies long ramp-up times in high latency links like
        LTNs.

      - During slow start, the sender increases its window in units
        of segments. This is why it is important to use an
        appropriately large MTU which, in turn, requires reliable
        link layers.


4.1.2 Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery

   When a TCP sender receives several duplicate ACKs, fast
   retransmit [RFC2001, updated in TCPCONG] allows it to infer that
   a segment was lost.  The sender retransmits what it considers to
   be this lost segment without waiting for the full timeout, thus
   saving time.

   After a fast retransmit, a sender invokes the fast recovery
   [RFC2001] algorithm, whereby it invokes congestion avoidance,
   but not slow start.  This also saves time.

   In general, TCP can increase its window beyond the
   delay-bandwidth product. However, in LTN links the TCP window
   may remain rather small, less than four segments, for long
   periods of time due to any of the following reasons:

      1. Typical "file size" to be transferred over a connection is
         relatively small (Web requests, Web document objects,
         email messages, files, etc.) In particular, users of LTNs
         are not very willing to carry out large transfers as the
         response time is so long.

      2. If the link has high BER, the cwnd tends to stay small

      3. When an LTN is combined with a highly congested wireline
         Internet path, congestion losses on the Internet have the
         same effect as 2.

      4. Commonly, ISPs/operators configure only a small number of
         buffers (even as few as for 3 packets) per user in their
         dial-up routers

      5. Often small socket buffers are recommended with LTNs in
         order to prevent the RTO from inflating and to keep the
         amount of packets with competing traffic at a lower
         level.



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   A small window effectively prevents the sender from taking
   advantage of Fast Retransmits. Moreover, efficient recovery from
   multiple losses within a single window requires adoption of new
   proposals [NewReno]. In addition, on long delay paths with no
   packet reordering waiting for three duplicate ACKs to arrive
   postpones retransmission unnecessarily.

   Recommendation: Implement Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery at
   this time. This is a widely-implemented optimization and is
   currently at Proposed Standard level. [AGS98] recommends
   implementation of Fast Retransmit/Fast Recovery in satellite
   environments.  NewReno apparently does help a sender better
   handle partial ACKs and multiple losses in a single window, but
   at this point is not recommended due to its experimental
   nature.  Instead, SACK is the preferred mechanism.


4.2 Connection Setup with T/TCP [RFC1397, RFC1644]

   TCP engages in a "three-way handshake" whenever a new connection
   is set up.  Data transfer is only possible after this phase has
   completed successfuly.  T/TCP allows data to be exchanged in
   parallel with the connection set up, saving valuable time for
   short transactions on long-latency networks.

   Recommendation: T/TCP is not recommended, for these reasons:

   - It is an Experimental RFC, and has not been advanced.

   - It is not widely deployed, and it has to be deployed at both
     ends of a connection.

   - Security concerns have been raised that T/TCP is more vulnerable
     to address-spoofing attacks than TCP itself.

   - At least some of the benefits of T/TCP (eliminating three-way
     handshake on subsequent query-response transactions, for
     instance) are also available with persistent connections on
     HTTP/1.1, which is more widely deployed.

   [ADGGHOSSTT98] does not have a recommendation on T/TCP in
   satellite environments.


4.3 Slow Start Proposals

   Because slow start dominates the network response seen by
   interactive users at the beginning of a TCP connection, a number



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   of proposals have been made to modify or or eliminate slow start
   in long latency environments.

   Stability of the Internet is paramount, so these proposals must
   demonstrate that they will not adversely affect Internet
   congestion levels in significant ways.


4.3.1 Larger Initial Window

   Full slow start, with an initial window of one segment, is a
   time-consuming bandwidth adaptation procedure over LTNs. Recent
   proposals suggest starting off with an initial window larger than
   one segment [RFC2414, AHO98].

   In simulations with an increased initial window of three packets
   [RFC2415], this proposal does not contribute significantly to
   packet drop rates, and it has the added benefit of improving
   initial response times when the peer device delays
   acknowledgements during slow start (see next proposal).

   [RFC2416] addresses situations where the initial window exceeds
   the number of buffers available to TCP and indicates that this
   situation is no different from the case where the congestion
   window grows beyond the number of buffers available.

   We expect the IETF tcp-impl working group to recommend allowing an
   initial window of at least two segments, and perhaps as many as
   four, in the near future, in environments where this significantly
   improves performance (LFNs and LTNs).

   Recommendation: Implement this on devices now. The research on
   this optimization indicates that 3 segments is a safe initial
   setting, and is centering on choosing between 2, 3, and 4. For
   now, use 2, which at least allows clients running query-response
   applications to get an initial ACK from unmodified servers
   without waiting for a delayed ACK timeout of 200-500
   milliseconds, and saves two round-trips. An initial window of 3
   [RFC2415] looks promising and may be adopted in the future
   pending further research and experience.

   Mitigations that inject additional ACKs (whether
   "ACK-first-segment" or "ACK-every-segment-during-slow-start")
   beyond what today's conformant TCPs inject are only applicable
   early in the life of the connection. After an initial exchange,
   the connection has completed slow-start, so TCPs would not
   inject additional ACKs unless (1) the connection is closed,
   and a new connection is opened, or (2) the TCPs handle idle



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   connection restart correctly by performing slow start. If both
   clients and servers implement HTTP/1.1 persistent connections,
   the connection would only execute the "inject additional ACKs"
   strategy once. Injecting additonal ACKs is an optimization
   that works with older servers that implement only HTTP/1.0.


4.3.2 Handling Acknowledgments During Slow Start

   The sender increases its window based on the flow of ACKs coming
   back from the receiver. Particularly during slow start, this flow
   is very important.  A couple of the proposals that have been
   studied are (1) ACK counting and (2) ACK-every-segment.


4.3.2.1 ACK Counting

   The main idea behing ACK counting is:

      - Make each ACK count to its fullest by growing the window
        based on the data being acknowledged (byte counting) instead
        of the number of ACKs (ACK counting). This has been shown to
        cause bursts which lead to congestion. [Allman98] shows that
        Limited Byte Counting (LBC), in which the window growth is
        limited to 2 segments, does not lead to as much burstiness,
        and offers some performance gains.

   Recommendation: Unlimited byte counting is not recommended.  Van
   Jacobson cautions against byte counting [TCPSATMIN] because it
   leads to burstiness, and recommends ACK spacing [ACKSPACING]
   instead.

   ACK spacing requires ACKs to consistently pass through a single
   ACK-spacing router.  This requirement works well for W-WAN
   environments if the ACK-spacing router is also the base station.

   Limited byte counting warrants further investigation before we can
   recommend this proposal, but it shows promise.


4.3.2.2 ACK-every-segment

   The main idea behind ACK-every-segment is:

      - Keep a constant stream of ACKs coming back by turning off
        delayed ACKs [RFC1122] during slow start. ACK-every-segment
        must be limited to slow start, in order to avoid penalizing
        asymmetric-bandwidth configurations.



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   Even though simulations confirm its promise (it allows receivers
   to receive the second segment from unmodified senders without
   waiting for a delayed ACK timeout of 200-500 milliseconds), for
   this technique to be practical the receiver must acknowledge
   every segment only when the sender is in slow start.  Continuing
   to do so when the sender is in congestion avoidance may have
   adverse effects on the mobile device's battery consumption and
   on traffic in the network.

   This violates a SHOULD in [TCPCONG]:  delayed acknowledgements
   SHOULD be used by a TCP receiver.

   "Disabling Delayed ACKs During Slow Start" is technically
   unimplementable, as the receiver has no way to know when the
   sender crosses ssthresh (the "slow start threshold") and begins
   using the congestion avoidance algorithm.  If receivers follow
   recommendations for increased initial windows, disabling delayed
   ACKs during an increased initial window would open the TCP window
   more rapidly without doubling ACK traffic in general.

   Again, much of the benefit of this optimization is also available
   after the first request-response exchange when clients and servers
   both implement HTTP/1.1. This optimization works with older
   servers that implement only HTTP/1.0.

   Recommendation: ACK only the first segment on a new connection
   with no delay. Even this conservative recommendation saves one
   delayed ACK timeout at the receiver, which, in typical WWW
   applications, saves one delayed ACK timeout in each direction.


4.3.3 Terminating Slow Start

   New mechanisms [ADGGHOSSTT98] are being proposed to improve
   TCP's adaptive properties such that the available bandwidth is
   better utilized while reducing the possibility of congesting the
   network, which results in the closing of the congestion window
   to 1 segment, and the subsequent slow start phase.

   Theoretically, an optimum value for slow-start threshold
   (ssthresh) allows connection bandwidth utilization to ramp up as
   aggressively as possible without "overshoot" (using so much
   bandwidth that packets are lost and congestion avoidance
   procedures are invoked).

   Recommendation: Estimating the slow start threshold is not
   recommended.  Although this would be helpful if we knew how to do
   it, rough consensus on the tcp-impl and tcp-sat mailing lists is



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   that in non-trivial operational networks there is no reliable
   method to probe during TCP startup and estimate the bandwidth
   available.


4.4 ACK Spacing

   During slow start, the sender responds to the incoming ACK
   stream by transmitting N+1 segments for each ACK, where N is the
   number of new segments acknowledged by the incoming ACK.  This
   results in data being sent at twice the speed at which it can be
   processed by the network.  Accordingly, queues will form, and
   due to insufficient buffering at the bottleneck router, packets
   may get dropped before the link's capacity is full.

   Spacing out the ACKs effectively controls the rate at which the
   sender will transmit into the network, and may result in little
   or no queueing at the bottleneck router [ACKSPACING].
   Furthermore, ack spacing reduces the size of the bursts.

   Recommendation: No recommendation at this time. Continue
   monitoring research in this area.


4.5 Delayed Duplicate Acknowlegements

   As was mentioned above, link-layer retransmissions may decrease
   the BER enough that congestion accounts for most of packet
   losses; still, nothing can be done about interruptions due to
   handoffs, moving beyond wireless coverage, etc. In this
   scenario, it is imperative to prevent interaction between
   link-layer retransmission and TCP retransmission as these layers
   duplicate each other's efforts. In such an environment it may
   make sense to delay TCP's efforts so as to give the link-layer a
   chance to recover. With this in mind, the Delayed Dupacks [MV97,
   Vaidya99] scheme selectively delays duplicate acknowledgements
   at the receiver.  It is preferrable to allow a local mechanism
   to resolve a local problem, instead of invoking TCP's end-to-end
   mechanism and incurring the associated costs, both in terms of
   wasted bandwidth and in terms of its effect on TCP's window
   behavior.

   The Delayed Dupacks schemes can be used depite IP encryption
   since the base station does not need look at TCP headers.

   Recommendation: Delaying duplicate acknowledgements may be
   useful in specific network topologies, but a general
   recommendation requires further research and experience.



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   Currently, it is not well understood how long the receiver
   should delay the duplicate acknowledgments. Furthermore, Delayed
   Dupacks is only beneficial in certain types of network links
   (see section 4.10.3).


4.6 Selective Acknowledgements [RFC2018]

   SACK may not be useful in many LTNs, according to Section 1.1 of
   [TCPHP].  In particular, SACK is more useful in the LFN regime,
   especially if large windows are being used, because there is a
   considerable probability of multiple segment losses per window. In
   the LTN regime, TCP windows are much smaller, and burst errors
   must be much longer in duration in order to damage multiple
   segments.

   Accordingly, the complexity of SACK may not be justifiable, unless
   there is a high probability of burst errors and congestion on the
   wireless link. A desire for compatibility with TCP recommendations
   for non-LTN environments may dictate LTN support for SACK anyway.

   [AGS98] recommends use of SACK with Large TCP Windows in satellite
   environments, and notes that this implies support for PAWS
   (Protection Against Wrapped Sequence space) and RTTM (Round Trip
   Time Measurement) as well.

   Berkeley's SNOOP protocol research [SNOOP] indicates that SACK
   does improve throughput for SNOOP when multiple segments are lost
   per window [BPSK96]. SACK allows SNOOP to recover from
   multi-segment losses in one round-trip. In this case, the mobile
   device needs to implement some form of selective
   acknowledgements.  If SACK is not used, recovery from
   multi-segment losses takes so long that TCP enters congestion
   avoidance anyway.

   Recommendation: Implement SACK now for compatibility with other
   TCPs and improved performance with SNOOP.


4.7 Detecting Corruption Loss


4.7.1 Without Explicit Notification

   In the absence of explicit notification from the network, some
   researchers have suggested statistical methods for congestion
   avoidance [Jain89, WC91, VEGAS]. A natural extension of these
   heuristics would enable a sender to distinguish between losses



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   caused by congestion and other causes.  The research results on
   the reliability of sender-based heuristics is unfavorable [BV97,
   BV98]. [BV98a] reports better results in constrained environments
   using packet inter-arrival times measured at the receiver, but
   highly-variable delay - of the type encountered in wireless
   environments during intercell handoff - confounds these
   heuristics.

   Recommendation: No recommendation at this time - continue to
   monitor research results.


4.7.2 With Explicit Notifications

   With explicit notification from the network it is possible to
   determine when a loss is due to congestion. Several proposals
   along these lines include:

      - Explicit Loss Notification (ELN) [BPSK96]

      - Explicit Bad State Notification (EBSN) [BBKVP96]

      - Explicit Loss Notification to the Receiver (ELNR), and
        Explicit Delayed Dupack Activation Notification (EDDAN)
        (notifications to mobile receiver) [MV97]

      - Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [ECN]

   Of these proposals, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
   seems closest to deployment on the Internet, and will provide
   some benefit for TCP connections on long thin networks (as well
   as for all other TCP connections).

   Recommendation: No recommendation at this time. Schemes like ELNR
   and EDDAN [MV97], in which  the only systems that need to be
   modified are the base station and the mobile device are slated for
   adoption pending further research.  However, the requirement that
   the base station be able to examine the TCP headers flying through
   it raises the previously stated issues with respect to
   IPSEC-encrypted packets.

   ECN uses the TOS byte in the IP header to carry congestion
   information (ECN-capable and Congestion-encountered).  This byte
   is not encrypted in IPSEC, so ECN can be used on TCP connections
   that are encrypted using IPSEC.

   Recommendation: Implement ECN.




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   Note: Absence of packets marked with ECN should not be interpreted
   by ECN-capable TCP connections as a green light for aggressive
   retransmissions. On the contrary, during periods of extreme
   network congestion routers may drop packets marked with explicit
   notification because their buffers are exhausted - exactly the
   wrong time for a host to begin retransmitting aggressively.


4.8 Active Queue Management

   As has been pointed out above, TCP responds to congestion by
   closing down the window and invoking slow start. Long-delay
   networks take a particularly long time to recover from this
   condition. Accordingly, it is imperative to avoid congestion in
   LTNs. To remedy this, active queue management techniques have been
   proposed as enhancements to routers throughout the Internet [RED].
   The primary motivation for deployment of these mechanisms is to
   prevent "congestion collapse" (a severe degradation in service) by
   controlling the average queue size at the routers. As the average
   queue length grows, Random Early Detection [RED] increases the
   possibility of dropping packets.

   The benefits are:

      - Reduce packet drops in routers. By dropping a few packets
        before severe congestion sets in, RED avoids dropping
        bursts of packets. In other words, the objective is to drop
        m packets early to prevent n drops later on, where m is
        less than n.

      - Provide lower delays. This follows from the smaller queue
        sizes, and is particularly important for interactive
        applications, for which the inherent delays of wireless links
        already push the user experience to the limits of the
        non-acceptable.

      - Avoid lock-outs. Because of active queue management, it
        is very likely for an incoming packet to find available
        buffer space at the router.

  Active Queue Management has two components: (1) routers detect
  congestion before exhausting their resources, and (2) they
  provide some form of congestion indication. Dropping packets
  via RED is only one example of the latter.  Another way to
  indicate congestion is to use ECN [ECN] as discussed above under
  "Detecting Corruption Loss: With Explicit Notifications."

  Recommendation: RED is currently being deployed in the Internet,



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  and LTNs should follow suit. ECN deployment should complement RED's.


4.9 Scheduling Algorithms

   Active queue management helps control the length of the queues.
   Additionally, a general solution requires replacing FIFO with
   other scheduling algorithms that improve:

     1. Fairness (by policing how different packet streams utilize
        the available bandwidth), and

     2. Throughput (by improving the transmitter's radio channel
        utilization).

   For example, fairness is necessary for interactive applications
   (like telnet or web browsing) to coexist with bulk transfer
   sessions. Proposals here include:

      - Fair Queueing (FQ) [Demers90]

      - Class-based Queueing (CBQ) [Floyd95]

   Even if they are only implemented over the wireless link portion
   of the communication path, these proposals are attractive in
   wireless LTN environments, because new connections for interactive
   applications can have difficulty starting when a bulk TCP transfer
   has already stabilized using all available bandwidth.

   In our base architecture described above, the mobile device
   typically communicates directly with only one wireless peer at a
   given time: the base station. In some W-WANs, it is possible to
   directly address other mobiles within the same cell.  Direct
   communication with each such wireless peer may traverse a
   spatially distinct path, each of which may exhibit statistically
   independent radio link characteristics. Channel State Dependent
   Packet Scheduling (CSDP) [BBKT96] tracks the state of the various
   radio links (as defined by the target devices), and gives
   preferential treatment to packets destined for radio links in a
   "good" state. This avoids attempting to transmit to (and expect
   acknowledgements from) a peer on a "bad" radio link, thus
   improving throughput.

   A further refinement of this idea suggests that both fairness and
   throughput can be improved by combining a wireless-enhanced CBQ
   with CSDP [FSS98].

   Recommendation: No recommendation at this time, pending further



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   study.


4.10 Split TCP and Performance-Enhancing Proxies (PEPs)

   Given the dramatic differences between the wired and the
   wireless links, a very common approach is to provide some
   impedance matching where the two different technologies meet: at
   the intermediate node (base station).

   The idea is to replace an end-to-end TCP connection with two
   clearly distinct connections: one across the wireless link, the
   other across its wireline counterpart. Each of the two resulting
   TCP sessions operates under very different networking
   characteristics, and may adopt the policies best suited to its
   particular medium.  For example, in a specific LTN topology it may
   be desirable to modify TCP Fast Retransmission to resend after the
   first duplicate ack and Fast Recovery not to shrink TCP cnwd if
   the LTN link has an extremely long RTT, is known to not reorder
   packets, and is not subject to congestion. Moreover, on a
   long-delay link or on a link with a relatively high
   bandwidth-delay product it may be desirable to "slow-start" with a
   relatively large initial window, even larger than four segments.
   While these kinds of TCP modifications can be negotiated to be
   employed over the LTN link, they would not be deployed end-to-end
   over the global Internet. In LTN topologies where the underlying
   link characteristics are known, a great number of similar type of
   performance enhancements can be employed without endangering
   operations over the global Internet.

   In some proposals, in addition to a PEP mechanism at the
   intermediate node, custom protocols are used on the wireless
   link (for example, [WAP], [YB94] or [MOWGLI]).

   Even if the gains from using non-TCP protocols are moderate or
   better, the wealth of research on optimizing TCP for wireless, and
   compatibility with the Internet are compelling reasons to adopt
   TCP on the wireless link (enhanced as suggested in section 5
   below).


4.10.1 Split TCP Approaches

   Split-TCP proposals include schemes like I-TCP [ITCP] and MTCP
   [YB94] which achieve performance improvements by abandoning
   end-to-end semantics. The Mowgli architecture [MOWGLI] proposes
   a split approach with support for various enhancements at all
   the protocol layers, not only at the transport layer. Mowgli



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   provides an option to replace the TCP/IP core protocols on the
   LTN link with a custom protocol that is tuned for LTN links
   [KRLKA97].  Also with this option, Mowgli preserves the socket
   semantics on the mobile device so that legacy applications can
   be run unmodified.

   Employing split TCP approaches have several benefits as well as
   drawbacks. Benefits related to split TCP approaches include the
   following:

   - Splitting the end-to-end TCP connection into two parts is a
     straightforward way to shield the problems of the wireless
     link from the wireline Internet path, and vice versa. Thus, a
     split TCP approach enables applying local solutions to the
     local problems on the wireless link.  For example, it
     automatically solves the problem of distinguishing congestion
     related packet losses on the wireline Internet and packet
     losses due to transmission error on the wireless link as these
     occur on separate TCP connections. Moreover, temporary
     disconnections of the wireless link can be effectively
     shielded from the wireline Internet.

   - When one of the TCP connections crosses only a single hop
     wireless link or a very limited number of hops, some or all
     link characteristics for the wireless TCP path are known. For
     example, with a particular link we may know that the link
     provides reliable delivery of packets, packets are not
     delivered out of order, or the link is not subject to
     congestion. Having this information for the TCP path one could
     expect that defining the TCP mitigations to be employed
     becomes a significantly easier task. In addition, several
     mitigations that cannot be employed safely over the global
     Internet, can be succesfully employed over the wireless link.

   - Splitting one TCP connection into two separate ones allows
     much earlier deployment of various recent proposals to improve
     TCP performance over wireless links; only the TCP
     implementations of the mobile device and intermediate node
     need to be modified, thus allowing the vast number of Internet
     hosts to continue running the legacy TCP implementations
     unmodified. Any mitigations that would require modification of
     TCP in these wireline hosts may take far too long to become
     widely deployed.

   - Allows exploitation of various application level anhancements
     which may give significant performance gains (see section
     4.10.2).




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   Drawbacks related to split TCP approaches include the
   following:

   - One of the main criticisms against the split TCP approaches is
     that it breaks TCP end-to-end semantics. This has various
     drawbacks some of which are more severe than others. The most
     detrimental drawback is probably that splitting the TCP
     connection disables end-to-end usage of IP layer security
     mechanisms, precluding the application of IPSec to achieve
     end-to-end security. Still, IPSec could be employed separately
     in each of the two parts, thus requiring the intermediate node
     to become a party to the security association between the
     mobile device and the remote host. This, however, is an
     undesireable or unacceptable alternative in most cases. Other
     security mechanisms above the transport layer, like TSL or
     SOCKS, should be employed for end-to-end security.

   - Another drawback of breaking end-to-end semantics is that
     crashes of the intermediate node become unrecoverable
     resulting in termination of the TCP connections. Whether this
     should be considered a severe problem depends on the expected
     frequency of such crashes.

   - In many occasions claims have been stated that if TCP
     end-to-end semantics is broken, applications relying on TCP to
     provide reliable data delivery become more vulnerable. This,
     however, is an overstatement as a well-designed application
     should never fully rely on TCP in achieving end-to-end
     reliability at the application level. First, current APIs to
     TCP, such as the Berkeley socket interfece, do not allow
     applications to know when an TCP acknowledgement for
     previously sent user data arrives at TCP sender.  Second, even
     if the application is informed of the TCP acknowledgements,
     the sending application cannot know whether the receiving
     application has received the data: it only knows that the data
     reached the TCP receive buffer at the receiving end. Finally,
     in order to achieve end-to-end reliability at the application
     level an application level acknowledgement is required to
     confirm that the receiver has taken the appropriate actions on
     the data it received.

   - When a mobile device moves, it is subject to handovers by the
     serving base station. If the base station acts as the
     intermediate node for the split TCP connection, the state of
     both TCP endpoints on the previous intermediate node must be
     transferred to the new intermediate node to ensure continued
     operation over the split TCP connection. This requires extra
     work and causes overhead. However, in most of the W-WAN



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     wireless networks, unlike in W-LANs, the W-WAN base station
     does not provide the mobile device with the connection point
     to the wireline Internet.  Instead, W-WAN network takes care
     of the host mobility and retains the connection point to the
     wireline Internet unchanged while the mobile device moves.
     Thus, TCP state handover is not required in most W-WANs.

   - The packets traversing through all the protocol layers up to
     transport layer and again down to the link layer result in
     extra overhead at the intermediate node. In case of LTNs with
     low bandwidth, this extra overhead does not cause serious
     additional performance problems unlike with W-LANs that
     typically have much higher bandwidth.

   - Split TCP proposals are not applicable to networks with
     asymmetric routing. Deploying a split TCP approach requires
     that traffic to and from the mobile device be routed through
     the intermediate node. With some networks, this cannot be
     accomplished, or it requires that the intermediate node is
     located several hops away from the wireless network edge which
     in turn is unpractical in many cases and may result in
     non-optimal routing.

   It should noted that using split TCP does not necessarily
   exclude simultaneous usage of IP for end-to-end connectivity.
   Correct usage of split TCP should be managed per application or
   per connection and should be under the end-user control so that
   the user can decide whether a particular TCP connection or
   application makes use of split TCP or whether it operates
   end-to-end directly over IP.

   Recommendation: Split TCP proposals that alter TCP semantics are
   not recommended. Deploying custom protocols on the wireless
   link, such as MOWGLI proposes is not recommended, because this
   note gives preference to (1) improving TCP instead of designing
   a custom protocol and (2) allowing end-to-end sessions at all
   times.


4.10.2 Application Level Proxies

   Nowadays, application level proxies are widely used in the
   Internet. Such proxies include Web proxy caches, relay MTAs
   (Mail Transfer Agents), and secure transport proxies (e.g.,
   SOCKS). Employing an application level proxy practically results
   in a "split TCP connection" with the proxy as the intermediary.
   Hence, some of the problems present with wireless links, such as
   combining of a congested wide-area Internet path with a wireless



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   LTN link, are automatically alleviated to some extent.

   The application protocols often employ plenty of (unnecessary)
   round trips, lots of headers and inefficient encoding. Even
   unnecessary data may get delivered over the wireless link in
   regular application protocol operation. In many cases a
   significant amount of this overhead can be reduced by simply
   running an application level proxy on the intermediate node.
   With LTN links, significant additional improvement can be
   achieved by introducing application level proxies with
   application-specific enhancements. Such a proxy may employ an
   enhanced version of the application protocol over the wireless
   link. In an LTN environment enhancements at the application
   layer may provide much more notable performance improvements
   than any transport level enhancements.

   The Mowgli system provides full support for adding application
   level agent-proxy pairs between the client and the server, the
   agent on the mobile device and the proxy on the intermediate
   node. Such a pair may be either explicit or fully transparent to
   the applications, but it is, at all times, under the end-user
   control. Good examples of enhancements achieved with
   application-specific proxies include Mowgli WWW [LAKLR95],
   [LHKR96] and WebExpress [HL96], [CTCSM97].

   Recommendation: Usage of application level proxies is
   conditionally recommended: an application must be proxy enabled
   and the decision of employing a proxy for an application must be
   under the user control at all times.


4.10.3 Snoop and its Derivatives

   Berkeley's SNOOP protocol [SNOOP] is a hybrid scheme mixing
   link-layer reliability mechanisms with the split connection
   approach. It is an improvement over split TCP approaches in that
   end-to-end semantics are retained. SNOOP does two things:

     1. Locally (on the wireless link) retransmit lost packets,
        instead of allowing TCP to do so end-to-end.

     2. Suppress the duplicate acks on their way from the receiver
        back to the sender, thus avoiding fast retransmit and
        congestion avoidance at the latter.

   Thus, the Snoop protocol is designed to avoid unnecessary fast
   retransmits by the TCP sender, when the wireless link layer
   retransmits a packet locally. Consider a system that does not



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   use the Snoop agent. Consider a TCP sender S that sends packets
   to receiver R via a base station BS. Assume that the sender
   sends packet A, B, C, D, E (in that order) which are forwarded
   by BS to the wireless receiver R. Assume that the base station
   then retransmits B subsequently, because the first transmission
   of packet B is lost due to errors on the wireless link. In this
   case, receiver R receives packets A, C, D, E and B (in that
   order). Receipt of packets C, D and E triggers duplicate
   acknowledgement. When the TCP sender receives three duplicate
   acknowledgements, it triggers fast retransmit (which results in
   a retransmission, as well as reduction of congestion window).
   The fast retransmit occurs despite the link level retransmit on
   the wireless link, degrading throughput.

   SNOOP [SNOOP] deals with this problem by dropping TCP dupacks
   appropriately (at the base station). The Delayed Dupacks (see
   section 4.5) attempts to approximate Snoop without requiring
   modifications at the base station or intermediate system.  Such
   schemes are needed only if the possibility of a fast retransmit
   due to wireless errors is non-negligible. In particular, if the
   wireless link uses a stop-and-go protocol (or otherwise delivers
   packets in-order), then these schemes are not very beneficial.
   Also, if the bandwidth-delay product of the wireless link is
   smaller than four segments, the probability that the base
   station will have an opportunity to send three new packets
   before a lost packet is retransmitted is small.  Since at least
   three dupacks are needed to trigger a fast retransmit, with a
   wireless bandwidth-delay product less than four packets, schemes
   such as Snoop and Delayed Dupacks would not be necessary (unless
   the link layer is not designed properly).  Conversely, when the
   wireless bandwidth-delay product is large enough, Snoop can
   provide significant performance improvement (compared with
   standard TCP).

   The Delayed Dupacks scheme tends to provide performance benefit
   in environments where Snoop performs well. In general,
   performance improvement achieved by the Delayed Dupacks scheme
   is a function of packet loss rates due to congestion and
   transmission errors. When congestion-related losses occur, the
   Delayed Dupacks scheme unnecessarily delays retransmission.
   Thus, in presence of congestion losses, the Delayed Dupacks
   scheme cannot achieve the same performance improvement as
   Snoop.  However, simulation results [Vaidya99] indicate that the
   Delayed Dupacks can achieve a significant improvement in
   performance despite moderate congestion losses.

   WTCP [WTCP] is similar to SNOOP in that it preserves end-to-end
   semantics.  In WTCP, the base station uses a complex scheme to



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   hide the time it spends moving packets across the wireless link
   (this typically includes retransmissions due to error recovery,
   but may also include time spent dealing with congestion). In
   order to work effectively, it assumes that the TCP endpoints
   implement the Timestamps option in RFC 1323 [TCPHP].
   Unfortunately, support for RFC 1323 in TCP implementations is
   not yet widespread. Beyond this, WTCP requires changes only at
   the base station.

   SNOOP and WTCP require the base station to examine and operate
   on the traffic between the portable wireless device and the TCP
   server on the wired Internet. SNOOP and WTCP do not work if the
   IP traffic is encrypted, unless, of course, the base station
   shares the security association between the mobile device and
   its end-to-end peer.  They also require that both the data and
   the corresponding ACKs traverse the same base station.
   Furthermore, if the base station retransmits packets at the
   transport layer across the wireless link, this may duplicate
   efforts by the link-layer.  SNOOP has been described by its
   designers as a TCP-aware link-layer. This is the right
   approach:  the link and network layers can be much more aware of
   each other than traditional OSI layering suggests.

   Encryption of IP packets via IPSEC's ESP header (in either
   transport or tunnel mode) renders the TCP header and payload
   unintelligible to the base station. This precludes SNOOP (and
   WTCP) from working, because it needs to examine the TCP headers
   in both directions. Possible solutions involve:

   - making the SNOOP (or WTCP) base station a party to the
     security association between the client and the server

   - IPSEC tunneling mode, terminated at the SNOOPing base station

   However, these techniques require that users trust base stations.
   Users valuing both privacy and performance should use SSL or SOCKS
   for end-to-end security.

   Recommendation: Implement SNOOP on base stations now. Research
   results are encouraging, and it is an "invisible" optimization
   in that neither the client nor the server needs to change, only
   the base station (for basic SNOOP without SACK). However, there
   is little or no benefit from implementing SNOOP if:








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      1. The wireless link provides reliable, in-order packet
         delivery, or,

      2. The bandwidth-delay product of the wireless link is
         smaller than four segments.


4.10.4 PEPs to handle Periods of Disconnection

   Periods of disconnection are very common in wireless networks,
   either during handoff, due to lack of resources (dropped
   connections) or natural obstacles. During these periods, a TCP
   sender does not receive the expected acknowledgements.  Upon
   expiration of the retransmit timer, this causes TCP to close its
   congestion window  with all the related drawbacks.
   Re-transmitting packets is useless since the connection is
   broken. [M-TCP] aims at enabling TCP to better handle handoffs
   and periods of disconnection, while preserving end-to-end
   semantics.  M-TCP adds an element: supervisor host (SH-TCP) at
   the edge of the wireless network.

   This intermediate node monitors the traffic coming from the
   sender to the mobile device. It does not break end-to-end
   semantics because the ACKs sent from the intermediate node to
   the sender are effectively the ones sent by the mobile node. The
   principle is to retain the last ACK, so that the SH-TCP could
   shut down the sender's window by sending the last ACK with a
   window set to zero. Thus the sender will go to persist mode.

   The second optimization is done on both the intermediate node
   and the mobile host. On the latter, TCP is aware of the current
   state of the connection. In the event of a disconnection, it is
   capable of freezing all timers. Upon reconnection, the mobile
   sends a specially marked ACK with the number of the highest byte
   received.  The intermediate node assumes that the mobile is
   disconnected because it monitors the flow on the wireless link,
   so in the absence of acknowledgments from the mobile, it will
   inform SH-TCP, which will send the ACK closing the sender window
   as described in the previous paragraph. The intermediate node
   learns that the mobile is again connected when it receives a
   duplicate acknowledgment marked as reconnected.  Non overlapping
   or non soft handoffs are lightweight because the previous
   intermediate system  can shrink the window, and the new one
   modifies it as soon as it has received an indication from the
   mobile.

   Recommendation: M-TCP is not slated for adoption at this moment,



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   because of the higly experimental nature of the proposal, and
   the uncertainty that tcp/ip implementations handle zero window
   updates correctly. Continue tracking developments in this
   space.


4.11 Header Compression Alternatives

   Because Long Thin Networks are bandwidth-constrained, compressing
   every byte out of over-the-air segments is worth while.

   Mechanisms for TCP and IP header compression defined in
   [RFC1144, IPHC, IPHC-RTP, IPHC-PPP] provide the following
   benefits:

      - Improve interactive response time

      - Allow using small packets for bulk data with good line
        efficiency

      - Allow using small packets for delay sensitive low data-rate
        traffic

      - Decrease header overhead (for the smallest MTU of 512 the
        header overhead of TCP over IP can decrease from 11.7 to less
        than 1 per cent.

      - Reduce packet loss rate over lossy links.

   Van Jacobson (VJ) header compression [RFC1144] describes a
   Proposed Standard for TCP Header compression that is widely
   deployed.  It uses TCP timeouts to detect a loss of
   synchronization between the compressor and decompressor. [IPHC]
   includes an explicit request for retransmission of an uncompressed
   packet to allow resynchronization without waiting for a TCP
   timeout (and executing congestion avoidance procedures).

   Recommendation: Implement [IPHC], in particular as it relates to
   IPv4 tunnels and Minimal Encapsulation for Mobile IP, as well as
   TCP header compression  for lossy links and links that reorder
   packets. PPP capable devices should implement [IPHC-PPP].  VJ
   header compression may optionally be implemented as it is a
   widely deployed Proposed Standard.  However, it should only be
   enabled when operating over reliable LTNs, because even a single
   bit error most probably would result in a full TCP window being
   dropped, followed by a costly recovery via slow-start.





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4.12 IP Payload Compression

   Compression of IP payloads is also desirable. "IP Payload
   Compression Protocol (IPComp)" [IPPCP] defines a framework where
   common compression algorithms can be applied to arbitrary IP
   segment payloads. IP payload compression is something of a niche
   optimization. It is necessary because IP-level security converts
   IP payloads to random bitstreams, defeating commonly-deployed
   link-layer compression mechanisms which are faced with payloads
   that have no redundant "information" that can be more compactly
   represented.

   However, many IP payloads are already compressed (images, audio,
   video, "zipped" files being FTPed), or are already encrypted above
   the IP layer (SSL/TLS, etc.). These payloads will not "compress"
   further, limiting the benefit of this optimization.

   HTTP-NG is considering supporting compression of resources at the
   HTTP level, which would provide equivalent benefits for common
   compressible MIME types like text/html. This will reduce the need
   for IPComp. If IPComp is deployed more rapidly than HTTP-NG,
   IPComp compression of HTML and MIME headers would be beneficial.

   In general, application-level compression can often outperform
   IPComp, because of the opportunity to use compression dictionaries
   based on knowledge of the specific data being compressed.

   Recommendation: IPComp may optionally be implemented. Track
   HTTP-NG standardization and deployment for now.


4.13 TCP Control Block Interdependence [Touch97]

   TCP maintains per-connection information such as connection state,
   current round-trip time, congestion control or maximum segment
   size.  Sharing information between two consecutive connections or
   when creating a new connection while the first is still active to
   the same host may improve performance of the latter connection.
   The principle could easily be extended to LAN coverage rather than
   limiting itself to hosts. [Touch97] describes cache update for
   both cases.

   Users of W-WAN devices frequently request connections to the same
   servers or set of servers. For example, in order to read their
   email or to initiate connections to other servers, the devices may
   be configured to always use the same email server or WWW proxy.
   The main advantage of this proposal is that it relieves the
   application of the burden of optimizing the transport layer. In



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   order to improve the performance of TCP connections, this
   mechanism only requires changes at the wireless device.

   In general, this scheme should improve the dynamism of connection
   setup without increasing the cost of the implementation.

   Recommendation: Recommended for implementation. Monitor research
   on this.


5 Summary of Recommended Optimizations

   The table below summarizes our recommendations with regards to the
   main proposals mentioned above.

   The first column, "Stability of the Proposal," refers to the
   maturity of the mechanism in question.  Some proposals are
   being pursued within the IETF in a somewhat open fashion. An
   IETF proposal is either an Internet Drafts (I-D) or a Request
   for Comments (RFC). The former is a preliminary version. There
   are several types of RFCs.  A Draft Standards (DS) is standards
   track, and carries more weight than a Proposed Standard (PS),
   which may still undergo revisions.  Informational or Experimental
   RFCs do not specify a standard. Other proposals are isolated
   efforts with little or no public review, and little chance of
   garnering industry backing.

   "Implemented at" indicates which participant in a TCP session
   must be modified to implement the proposal. Legacy servers
   typically cannot be modified, so this column indicates whether
   implementation happens at either or both of the two nodes under
   some control: mobile device and base station. The symbols used
   are: WS (wireless sender, that is, the mobile device's TCP send
   operation must be modified), WR (wireless receiver, that is,
   the mobile device's TCP receive operation must be modified), WD
   (wireless device, that is, modifications at the mobile device are
   not specific to either TCP send or receive), BS (base station)
   and NI (network infrastructure).

   The "Recommendation" column captures our suggestions.  Some
   mechanisms are endorsed for immediate adoption, others need more
   evidence and research, and others are not recommended.









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Name                   Stability of     Implemented   Recommendation
                       the Proposal     at
====================   =============    ===========   =================

Increased Initial      RFC 2414 (EXP)   WS            Yes
Congestion Window                                     (initial_window=2)

Disable delayed ACKs   NA               WR            When stable
during slow start

Byte counting          NA               WS            No
instead of ACK
counting

TCP Header             RFC 1144 (PS)    WD            Yes
compression for PPP                     BS            (see 4.11)

IP Payload             RFC 2393 (PS)    WD            Yes
Compression                             (simultaneously
(IPComp)                                needed on Server)

Header                 RFC 2507 (PS),   WD            Yes
Compression            RFC 2509 (PS)    BS            (For IPv4, TCP and
                                                      Mobile IP)

SNOOP plus SACK        In limited use   BS            Yes
                                        WD (for SACK)

Fast retransmit/fast   RFC 2001 (PS)    WD            Yes (should be
recovery                                              there already)

Transaction/TCP        RFC 1644         WD            No
                       (Experimental)   (simultaneously
                                        needed on Server)

Estimating Slow        NA               WS            No
Start Threshold
(ssthresh)

Delayed Duplicate      Not stable       WR            When stable
Acknowledgements                        BS (for
                                        notifications)

Class-based Queuing    NA               WD            When stable
on End Systems

Explicit Congestion    RFC 2481 (EXP)   WD            Yes



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Notification                            NI

TCP Control Block      RFC 2140         WD            Yes
Interdependence        (Informational)                (Track research)


   Of all the optimizations in the table above, only SNOOP plus SACK
   and Delayed duplicate acknowledgements are currently being
   proposed only for wireless networks. The others are being
   considered even for non-wireless applications. Their more general
   applicability attracts more attention and analysis from the
   research community.

   Of the above mechanisms, only Header Compression (for IP and TCP)
   and "SNOOP plus SACK" cease to work in the presence of IPSec.


6 Conclusion

   In view of the unpredictable and problematic nature of long thin
   networks, arriving at an optimized transport is a daunting task. We
   have reviewed the existing proposals along with future research
   items. Based on this overview, we also recommend mechanisms for
   implementation in long thin networks (LTNs).


7 Acknowledgements

   The authors are deeply indebted to the IETF tcpsat and  tcpimpl
   working groups. The following individuals have also provided
   valuable feedback: Mark Allman (NASA), Raphi Rom (Technion/Sun),
   Charlie Perkins (Sun), Peter Stark (Ericsson).


8 References

   [ACKSPACING] Partridge, C., "ACK Spacing for High Delay-Bandwidth
   Paths with Insufficient Buffering," September 1998. Internet-Draft
   draft-rfced-info-partridge-01.txt (work in progress).

   [ADGGHOSSTT98] Mark Allman, Spencer Dawkins, Dan Glover, Jim
   Griner, John Heidemann, Shawn Osterman, Keith Scott, Jeffrey
   Semke, Joe Touch, Diepchi Tran. Ongoing TCP Research Related to
   Satellites, August 1998.  Internet-Draft
   draft-ietf-tcpsat-res-issues-04.txt (work in progress).

   [AGS98] Mark Allman, Dan Glover, Luis Sanchez. "Enhancing TCP
   Over Satellite Channels using Standard Mechanisms," RFC 2488



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   (BCP 28), January 1999.

   [Allman98] Allman, M., "On the Generation and Use of TCP
   Acknowledgments," July, 1998. Submitted to ACM Computer
   Communication Review.

   [AHO98] Allman, M., Hayes, C., Ostermann, S., "An Evaluation of
   TCP with Larger Initial Windows," Computer Communication Review,
   28(3), July 1998.

   [BBKT96] Bhagwat, P., Bhattacharya, P., Krishna, A., Tripathi, S.,
   "Enhancing Throughput over Wireless LANs Using Channel State
   Dependent Packet Scheduling," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'96, pp.
   1133-40, March 1996.

   [BBKVP96] Bakshi, B., P., Krishna, N., Vaidya, N., Pradhan, D.K.,
   "Improving Performance of TCP over Wireless Networks," Technical
   Report 96-014, Texas A&M University, 1996.

   [BPSK96] Balakrishnan, H., Padmanabhan, V., Seshan, S., Katz, R.,
   "A Comparison of Mechanisms for Improving TCP Performance over
   Wireless Links," in ACM SIGCOMM, Stanford, California, August
   1996.

   [BV97] Biaz, S., Vaidya, N., "Using End-to-end Statistics to
   Distinguish Congestion and Corruption Lossses: A Negative Result,"
   Texas A&M University, Technical Report 97-009, August 18, 1997.

   [BV98] Biaz, S., Vaidya, N., "Sender-Based heuristics for
   Distinguishing Congestion Losses from Wireless Transmission
   Losses," Texas A&M University, Technical Report 98-013, June
   1998.

   [BV98a] Biaz, S., Vaidya, N., "Discriminating Congestion Losses
   from Wireless Losses using Inter-Arrival Times at the Receiver,"
   Texas A&M University, Technical Report 98-014, June 1998.

   [BW97] Brasche, G., Walke, B., "Concepts, Services, and Protocols
   of the New GSM Phase 2+ general Packet Radio Service," IEEE
   Communications Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 8, August 1997.

   [CB96] Cheshire, S., Baker, M., "Experiences with a Wireless
   Network in MosquitoNet," IEEE Micro, February 1996. Available
   online as:
   http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/papers/wireless.ps.

   [CDMA] Electronic Industry Alliance(EIA)/Telecommunications
   Industry Association (TIA), IS-95: Mobile Station-Base Station



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   Compatibility Standard for Dual-Mode Wideband Spread Spectrum
   Cellular System, 1993.

   [CDPD] Wireless Data Forum, CDPD System Specification, Release
   1.1, 1995.

   [CTCSM97] Chang, H., Tait, C., Cohen, N., Shapiro, M., Mastrianni,
   S., Floyd, R., Housel, B., Lindquist, D., "Web Browsing in a
   Wireless Environment: Disconnected and Asynchronous Operation in
   ARTour Web Express," in Proc. MobiCom'97, Budapest, Hungary,
   September 1997.

   [Demers90] Demers, A., Keshav, S., and Shenker, S., Analysis and
   Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm, Internetworking: Research
   and Experience, Vol. 1, 1990, pp. 3-26.

   [ECN] Ramakrishnan, K.K., Floyd, S., "A Proposal to add Explicit
   Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP", RFC 2481, January 1999.

   [Floyd95] Floyd, S., and Jacobson, V., Link-sharing and Resource
   Management Models for Packet Networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on
   Networking, Vol. 3 No.  4, pp. 365-386, August 1995.

   [FSS98] Fragouli, C., Sivaraman, V., Srivastava, M., "Controlled
   Multimedia Wireless Link Sharing via Enhanced Class-Based Queueing
   with Channel-State-Dependent Packet Scheduling," Proc. IEEE
   INFOCOM'98, April 1998.

   [GPRS] ETSI, "General Packet Radio Service (GPRS): Service
   Description, Stage 2," GSM03.60, v.6.1.1 August 1998.

   [GSM] Rahnema, M., "Overview of the GSM system and protocol
   architecture," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 31, pp 92-100,
   April 1993.

   [HL96] Hausel, B., Lindquist, D., "WebExpress: A System for
   Optimizing Web Browsing in a Wireless Environment," in Proc.
   MobiCom'96, Rye, New York, USA, November 1996.

   [IPPCP] A. Shacham, R. Monsour, R. Pereira, M. Thomas, "IP
   Payload Compression Protocol (IPComp)," RFC 2393, December
   1998.

   [IPHC] Mikael Degermark, Bjorn Nordgren, Stephen Pink. "IP
   Header Compression," RFC 2507, February 1999.

   [IPHC-RTP] S. Casner, V. Jacobson. "Compressing IP/UDP/RTP
   Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 2508, February 1999.



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   [IPHC-PPP] Mathias Engan, S. Casner, C. Bormann. "IP Header
   Compression over PPP," RFC 2509, February 1999.

   [ITCP] Bakre, A., Badrinath, B.R., "Handoff and Systems Support
   for Indirect TCP/IP. In Proceedings of the Second USENIX Symposium
   on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
   April 10-11, 1995.

   [Jain89] Jain, R., "A Delay-Based Approach for Congestion
   Avoidance in Interconnected Heterogeneous Computer Networks,"
   Digital Equipment Corporation, Technical Report DEC-TR-566, April
   1989.

   [Karn93] Karn, P., "The Qualcomm CDMA Digital Cellular System"
   Proc. USENIX Mobile and Location-Independent Computing
   Symposium, USENIX Association, August 1993.

   [KRLKA97] Kojo, M., Raatikainen, K., Liljeberg,  M., Kiiskinen,
   J., Alanko, T., "An Efficient Transport Service for Slow Wireless
   Telephone Links," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of
   Communication, volume 15, number 7, September 1997.

   [LAKLR95] Liljeberg, M., Alanko, T., Kojo, M., Laamanen, H.,
   Raatikainen, K., "Optimizing World-Wide Web for Weakly-Connected
   Mobile Workstations: An Indirect Approach," in Proc. 2nd Int.
   Workshop on Services in Distributed and Networked Environments,
   Whistler, Canada, pp. 132-139, June 1995.

   [LHKR96] Liljeberg, M., Helin, H., Kojo, M., Raatikainen, K.,
   "Mowgli WWW Software: Improved Usability of WWW in Mobile WAN
   Environments," in Proc.  IEEE Global Internet 1996 Conference,
   London, UK, November 1996.

   [LS98] Lettieri, P., Srivastava, M., "Adaptive Frame Length
   Control for Improving Wireless Link Throughput, Range, and Energy
   Efficiency," Proc.  IEEE INFOCOM'98, April 1998.

   [MNCP] Piscitello, D., Phifer, L., Wang, Y., Hovey, R., Mobile
   Network Computing Protocol (MNCP), August 1997. Internet-Draft
   draft-piscitello-mncp-00.txt (work in progress).

   [MOWGLI] Kojo, M., Raatikainen, K., Alanko, T., "Connecting Mobile
   Workstations to the Internet over a Digital Cellular Telephone
   Network," in Proc. Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Information
   Systems (MOBIDATA), Rutgers University, NJ, November 1994.
   Available at:  http://www.cs.Helsinki.FI/research/mowgli/. Revised
   version published in Mobile Computing, pp. 253-270, Kluwer, 1996.




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   [MSMO97] Mathis, M., Semke, J., Mahdavi, J., Ott, T., "The
   Macroscopic Behavior of the TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm,"
   in Computer Communications Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM,
   volume 27, number 3, July 1997.

   [MTCP] Brown, K. Singh, S., "A Network Architecture for Mobile
   Computing," Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'96, pp. 1388-1396, March 1996.
   Available at
   ftp://ftp.ece.orst.edu/pub/singh/papers/transport.ps.gz.

   [M-TCP] Brown, K. Singh, S., "M-TCP: TCP for Mobile Cellular
   Networks," ACM Computer Communications Review Vol. 27(5), 1997.
   Available at ftp://ftp.ece.orst.edu/pub/singh/papers/mtcp.ps.gz

   [MV97] Mehta, M., Vaidya, N., "Delayed
   Duplicate-Acknowledgements:  A Proposal to Improve Performance of
   TCP on Wireless Links," Texas A&M University, December 24, 1997.
   Available at http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/vaidya/mobile.html

   [NETBLT] John C. White, NETBLT (Network Block Transfer Protocol),
   draft-white-protocol-stack-00.txt, April 1997 - work in progress.

   [NewReno] Floyd, S., Henderson, T., "The NewReno Modification to
   TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm," February 1999. Internet-Draft
   draft-ietf-tcpimpl-newreno-02.txt (work in progress).

   [Paxson97] V. Paxson, "End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics,"
   Proc. SIGCOMM '97.  Available at
   ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/vp-pkt-dyn-sigcomm97.ps.Z

   [RED] Braden, B. Clark, D., Crowcroft, J., Davie, B., Deering, S.,
   Estrin, D., Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Minshall, G., Partridge, C.,
   Peterson, L., Ramakrishnan, K.K., Shenker, S., Wroclawski, J.,
   Zhang, L., "Recommendations on Queue Management and Congestion
   Avoidance in the Internet," RFC 2309, April 1998.

   [RLP] ETSI, "Radio Link Protocol for Data and Telematic Services
   on the Mobile Station - Base Station System (MS-BSS) interface
   and the Base Station System - Mobile Switching Center (BSS-MSC)
   interface," GSM Specification 04.22, Version 3.7.0, February
   1992.

   [RFC908] Velten, D., Hinden, R., Sax, J., "Reliable Data
   Protocol", RFC 908, July 1984.

   [RFC1030] Lambert, M., "On Testing the NETBLT Protocol over Divers
   Networks", RFC 1030, November 1987.




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   [RFC1122] Braden, R., Requirements for Internet Hosts --
   Communication Layers, October 1989.

   [RFC1144] Jacobson, V., "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for
   Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 1144, February 1990.

   [RFC1151] Partridge, C., Hinden, R., Version 2 of the Reliable
   Data Protocol (RDP), RFC 1151, April 1990.

   [RFC1191] Jeff Mogul and Steve Deering. Path MTU Discovery,
   November 1990.  RFC 1191.

   [RFC1397] Braden, R., Extending TCP for Transactions -- Concepts,
   November 1992.

   [RFC1644] Braden, R., T/TCP -- TCP Extensions for Transactions
   Functional Specification, July 1994.

   [RFC1661] Simpson, W., ed., "The Point-To-Point Protocol (PPP)",
   RFC 1661, July 1994.

   [RFC1986] Polites, W., Wollman, W., Woo, D., Langan, R.,
   "Experiments with a Simple File Transfer Protocol for Radio Links
   using Enhanced Trivial File Transfer Protocol (ETFTP)", RFC 1986,
   August 1996.

   [RFC2001] W. Richard Stevens. TCP Slow Start, Congestion
   Avoidance, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery Algorithms, January
   1997. RFC 2001.

   [RFC2002] Perkins, C., Editor, "IP Mobility Support", RFC 2002,
   October 1996.

   [RFC2018] Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and Romanow, A.,
   "TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options", October, 1996.

   [RFC2188] Banan, M., Taylor, M., Cheng, J., "AT&T/Neda's Efficient
   Short Remote Operations (ESRO) Protocol Specification Version
   1.2", RFC 2188, September 1997.

   [RFC2414] Mark Allman, Sally Floyd, Craig Partridge. Increasing
   TCP's Initial Window, September 1998. RFC 2414.

   [RFC2415] Poduri, K., Nichols, K. Simulation Studies of Increased
   Initial TCP Window Size, September 1998. RFC 2415.

   [RFC2416] Tim Shepard and Craig Partridge. When TCP Starts Up With
   Four Packets Into Only Three Buffers, September 1998. RFC 2416.



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   [SNOOP] Balakrishnan, H., Seshan, S., Amir, E., Katz, R.,
   "Improving TCP/IP Performance over Wireless Networks," Proc. 1st
   ACM Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom), Berkeley,
   CA, November 1995.

   [Stevens94] R. Stevens, "TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1,"
   Addison-Wesley, 1994 (section 11.3).

   [TCPCONG] M. Allman, V. Paxson, W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
   Control," February 1999. Internet-Draft
   draft-ietf-tcpimpl-cong-control-05.txt (work in progress).

   [TCPHP] Van Jacobson, Robert Braden, and David Borman. TCP
   Extensions for High Performance, May 1992. RFC 1323.

   [TCPSATMIN] TCPSAT Minutes, August, 1997. Available at:
   http://tcpsat.lerc.nasa.gov/tcpsat/meetings/munich-minutes.txt.

   [Touch97] Touch, T., "TCP Control Block Interdependence," RFC
   2140, April 1997.

   [Vaidya99] N. H. Vaidya, M. Mehta, C. Perkins, G. Montenegro,
   "Delayed Duplicate Acknowledgements: A TCP-Unaware Approach to
   Improve Performance of TCP over Wireless," Technical Report
   99-003, Computer Science Dept., Texas A&M University, February
   1999.

   [VEGAS] Brakmo, L., O'Malley, S., "TCP Vegas, New Techniques for
   Congestion Detection and Avoidance," SIGCOMM'94, London, pp 24-35,
   October 1994.

   [VMTP] Cheriton, D., "VMTP: Versatile Message Transaction
   Protocol", RFC 1045, February 1988.

   [WAP] Wireless Application Protocol Forum.
   http://www.wapforum.org/

   [WC91] Wang, Z., Crowcroft, J., "A New Congestion Control Scheme:
   Slow Start and Search," ACM Computer Communication Review, vol 21,
   pp 32-43, January 1991.

   [WTCP] Ratnam, K., Matta, I., "WTCP: An Efficient Transmission
   Control Protocol for Networks with Wireless Links," Technical
   Report NU-CCS-97-11, Northeastern University, July 1997. Available
   at:  http://www.ece.neu.edu/personal/karu/papers/WTCP-NU.ps.gz

   [YB94] Yavatkar, R., Bhagawat, N., "Improving End-to-End
   Performance of TCP over Mobile Internetworks," Proc. Workshop on



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   Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, IEEE Computer Society
   Press, Los Alamitos, California, 1994.


Authors' addresses

   Questions about this document may be directed at:












































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INTERNET DRAFT             Long Thin Networks              February 1999



          Gabriel E. Montenegro
          Sun Labs Networking and Security Group
          Sun Microsystems, Inc.
          901 San Antonio Road
          Mailstop UMPK 15-214
          Mountain View, California 94303

          Voice:  +1-650-786-6288
          Fax:    +1-650-786-6445
          E-Mail: gab@sun.com


          Spencer Dawkins
          Nortel Networks
          P.O. Box 833805
          Richardson, Texas 75083-3805

          Voice:  +1-972-684-4827
          Fax:    +1-972-685-3292
          E-Mail: sdawkins@nortel.com


          Markku Kojo
          University of Helsinki/Department of Computer Science
          P.O. Box 26 (Teollisuuskatu 23)
          FIN-00014 HELSINKI
          Finland

          Voice:  +358-9-7084-4179
          Fax:    +358-9-7084-4441
          E-Mail: kojo@cs.helsinki.fi


          Vincent Magret
          Corporate Research Center
          Alcatel Network Systems, Inc
          1201 Campbell
          Mail stop 446-310
          Richardson Texas 75081 USA
          M/S 446-310

          Voice:  +1-972-996-2625
          Fax:    +1-972-996-5902
          E-mail: vincent.magret@aud.alcatel.com


          Nitin Vaidya



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          Dept. of Computer Science
          Texas A&M University
          College Station, TX 77843-3112
          Phone: 409-845-0512
          Fax: 409-847-8578
          Email: vaidya@cs.tamu.edu













































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