CentaurusComm

January 1, 1999 - August 1, 2002

It is well-known that TCP performs poorly in wireless a environment. This project involves an empirical performance analysis of TCP on Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD), Bluetooth and Wireless LAN (WLAN). This analysis brings out the weaknesses of TCP in realistic conditions. We also describe the design of CentaurusComm, a message based transport protocol designed to perform well in low bandwidth networks and resource poor devices. In particular, CentaurusComm is optimized to handle data exchanges consisting of short message sizes. Typical mobile devices used in the experiments included Palm Pilots. We show that TCP performance on CDPD is very poor because of its low bandwidth and high latency. CentaurusComm outperforms TCP on CDPD. We show that on Bluetooth, which has higher bandwidth and lower latency than CDPD, both protocols perform comparably. On WLAN, which has the highest bandwidth of all three technologies, CentaurusComm performs comparably to TCP with a reduced window size.

We are currently working on an improved version of CentaurusComm. We propose to evaluate its performance on a reduced Bluetooth stack consisting of only the minimum required layers.

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