Architectural Enhancements for Improving TCP Performance over FSO Networks

Networks emerging as increasingly significant to US DoD visions comprise dynamic, heterogeneous terrestrial, airborne, and/or space-based nodes, some of whose links are directional, variable performance, and inherently unstable. Our work investigates an approach for maintaining TCP performance over such ad hoc networks with Free-Space Optical (FSO) links. We focus on a mechanism to differentiate random link error losses from congestion losses. Our simulations show that the end-to-end TCP response time improves significantly as compared to the standard TCP implementation over a variety of scenarios relevant to FSO networks.