Modeling Wireless Links for Transport Protocols

This paper lists several different intrinsic characteristics of wireless links for transport protocols and how we can model them in different environments. This paper specifically targets the design of transport layer protocols, thus the methods proposed are for the purpose of high level simulation. It split the wireless links into three main categories, cellular, WLAN and satellite. Previous protocol designs for TCP or other transport layer protocols have the assumption that dropped packets are all due to congestion, because the underlying links were physical connections, thus there were very few link layer corruptions. But for wireless links, several different factors come into play, including interference, data losses, delay variation, packet reordering, bandwidth variation etc.

Reading over this paper, it did help in reinforcing the different things that affect a wireless network, and the paper also mentioned the effects on the specific different type of wireless links (cellular, WLAN and satellite), but the modeling techniques mentioned seem intuitive. Also, there are still several issues that pure modeling can't emulate, such as network topology etc. But this paper provides a high level basic simulation method for designing higher level protocols, which is the target of this paper.