I-TCP:Indirect TCP for Mobile Hosts

Authors: Ajay Bakre and B.R.Badrinath Presented by Sampoorani Deivasigamani Oct 10, 2002 CS851 Mobile Computing
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Why not IP based solution?

Traditional TCP
Performance problems* due to mobility and nature of wireless links

Mobile IP
Prevents specialized handling of mobility, disconnection,link quality. * - R. Caceres and L. Iftode, The Effects of Mobility on Reliable Transport Protocols
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TCP Congestion control

Slow Start
Triggered upon timeout. Cwnd = 1 segment Increase cwnd by 1 for every ACK till cwnd=ssthresh Exponential backoff For every timeout, RTO = 2 * RTO, upto 64 sec Congestion control of TCP is too conservative when faced with mobility and wireless links
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Solutions
Modify TCP specifications
Infeasible Cannot determine reason for packet loss Indirect Protocol Model Use a split-connection approach Fixed Host (FH) and MSR - Regular TCP Mobile Host (MH) and MSR wireless TCP * MSR Mobility Source Router/ Base Station
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System Model

Split Connection Approach

Advantages 1. Simple Implementation 2. Backward compatible to TCP fixed hosts FH unaware of MSRs 3. Separates flow and congestion control of the wireless and wired link 4. Can optimize FH-MSR connection independently - different protocols, MTUs 5. Can support notifications that can be used by link and location aware applications
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Split Connection Approach (2)

Disadvantages 1. Violation of end-to-end semantics 2. MSR maintains state
MSR failure can cause connection loss Hand-off latency increases due to state transfer

3. Unless optimized, extra copying of data at MSR

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I-TCP facts
- Built on top of a mobile IP (ex. Columbia IP) - MSR acts a proxy to the MH it fakes an image of the MH and hands this to a new MSR during cell switches - Assuming no MSR failures and indefinite MH disconnection, I-TCP does not compromise end-to-end reliability. - Well-suited for throughput intensive applications
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I-TCP connection setup

Implementation
At MSR - Mobile IP and kernel changes to support I-TCP connections and handoffs - User level mhmicp* and msrmicp* - User level I-TCP daemon At MH - Mobile IP, I-TCP library, User level mhmicp* and msrmicp* *MICP Mobile Internetworking Control Protocol for beaconing and registration
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I-TCP interface at MH
Wrapper calls itcp_listen, itcp_accept, itcp_connect, itcp_close Informs local mhmicp of active I-TCP connections
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MSR I-TCP daemon

2 open sockets for each active I-TCP connection FH side socket bound to address and port of MH to fake MH and capture TCP packets on a per-connection basis* MH side socket own address/previous MSR address and port * - change to IP input routine to pass packets addressed to MH address up the TCP layer instead of forwarding through mobile-IP.
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MSR I-TCP daemon (2)

Runs in user space Copying overhead Additional end-to-end latency of 20ms

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I-TCP handoff
- Closely integrated with registration of Mobile IP - Transfer of socket state by the I-TCP daemon to new MSR - Must be fast (optimise to avoid unnecessary copying) - Buffering of data segments in transit when handoff is in progress to avoid congestion control
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I-TCP Handoff Primitives

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Interaction with Mobile IP

At MH: i-entries maintained in mhmicp, sent in greeting message to new MSR At MSR: 1. On getting I-entry list, I-TCP daemon creates skeleton sockets 2. Hand-off connection established with old MSR to transfer state 3. Old MSR freezes and deletes MH and FH sockets 4. New MSR installs and restarts connection
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TCP/Mobile IP handoff sequence

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TCP for Wireless links

- TF_INDIRECT flag marks I-TCP connections - When a move is detected, or MH reconnects retransmission timer is reset and slow start is entered. - To detect cell moves: MH can use notification For more information, refer A.Bakre, Design and Implementation of Indirect Protocols for Mobile Wireless Environments, PhD dissertation.
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Experiments
Testbed : 3 wireless cells, 2Mbps WaveLAN, 10Mbps Ethernet Cell configurations 1) No moves 2) Moves between overlapped cells 3) Moves between non-overlapped cells with 0 second between cells 4) Moves between non-overlapped cells with one second between cells
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Performance over Local Area

1. FH sees more uniform round-trip delays to MSR 2. Faster recovery from loss of segments

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Performance over Local Area

1. Regular TCP congestion control and exponential backoff kick in during cell crossover 2. I-TCP Flow control at MSR restricts packets resumes after handoff 3. Resetting retransmission timer and entering slow start immediately after handoff helps recover from congestion control in wireless link
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Performance over Local Area

MH -> FH performance is better MH 66MHz MSR 33MHz Better utilization when the wireless bottleneck link is the first Lighter handoffs (less state)

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Performance over Wide Area

I-TCP is about 2 times better! Faster recovery from loss of segments Aggregating effect at MSR (from FH 512 byte segments, to MH 1440 byte segments)

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Performance over Wide Area

I-TCP is about 3-4.5 times better in the last case. Retransmissions due to wireless link errors restricted to one link 2. Wireless part recovers faster from congestion control because of shorter round trip delays and resetting of retransmission timer at MSR after handoff
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Effects of Wireless Losses Local Area

I-TCP better up to 2*10-6, comparable thereafter If wireless TCP had smaller timeouts (currently min. of 500 ms) and selective ACKs, I-TCP performance should further improve

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Effects of Wireless Losses Wide Area

I-TCP performs significantly better due to faster recovery, aggregating effect at MSR At high error rates, throughput of I-TCP drops faster due to aggregating effect (1440 byte segments)
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Handoff Performance

MH switches between 2 MSRs every 10s,Data FH->MH Max. window size = socket buffer size During handover, full receive buffer (FH side) and full send buffer (MH side) needs to be transferred Bandwidth between MSRs, OS support important 27

Conclusions
Robust approach for confining mobility related problems to the wireless link TCP compatible Improved Performance Kernel resident implementation should speed things further Optimized transport protocol for the wireless link will have added benefits
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References
1. A.Bakre and B.R.Badrinath, I-TCP: Indirect
TCP for Mobile Hosts,Proc. 15th Intl Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, May 1995 2. A.Bakre and B.R.Badrinath, Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Indirect TCP, IEEE Transactions on Computers, March 1997 3. RFC 2001 TCP Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance, Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery

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