Abstract

Wireless communication is a major component of mobile computing. Transmission Control Protocol suffers from performance degradation in wireless environments. Due to high mobility and varying bit error rate in these environments, any packet loss that occurs is misinterpreted by the TCP as congestion and invokes congestion control mechanisms thereby degrading performance. Hence the performance of wireless networks is improved by introducing a cross layer design to exchange information between different layers. Cross layer optimizations produced many promising results which initiated research activity in this domain. This paper mainly focuses on cross layer proposals between network and transport layer and various TCP schemes employed to enhance performance.