Benefits and drawbacks of Mobile TCP

Question

Explain the benefits and drawbacks of the Mobile TCP.

Answer 1

Advantage of the mobile TCP is as follows:

a) M-TCP manages the TCP end-to-end semantic. The SH does not transmit any ACK itself however forwards the ACKs from the MH.

b)  If the MH gets disconnected, M_TCP prevents the useless retransmissions, slow starts or breaking connections by simply shrinking the sender’s window to 0;

c)  As the M-TCP  does  not  buffer  the data  in  SH  as  I-TCP  does,  it  is  not essential to forward the buffers to the new SH. Lost packets will automatically be retransmitted to new SH.

Disadvantages are listed as follows:

a) Since the SH does not act as the proxy as in I-TCP, packet loss on wireless link because of the bit errors is transmitted to the sender. M-TCP considers low bit error rates that are not always a valid assumption.

b) A modified TCP on wireless link not only need modification to MH,  protocol  software  however  also  new  network  components  such as  the  bandwidth manager.