Performance analysis of TCP NewReno over a cellular last-mile: buffer and channel losses

TCP NewReno is one of the most widely deployed TCP versions in today's Internet. However, a full understanding of the complex inter-dependencies between the losses due to wireless channel errors and those due to buffer overflows, and their (joint) impact on TCP NewReno's congestion control algorithm in wireless and wired-cum-wireless networks is still lacking. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive analytical model for, and study the performance of, TCP NewReno with a cellular last-mile access, taking into account both types of losses. We assume a frame-level Markovian loss model, and build a model that features the system's basic controllable parameters (such as the number of retransmissions and the buffer size), so as to study how they (jointly) affect the TCP-level throughput. We model certain finer aspects, e.g., correlations in wireless and buffer losses and their cross-correlation. We provide a summary of numerical results highlighting several non-trivial findings. In particular, we demonstrate that there exist optimal (i.e., TCP throughput maximizing) pairs of the number of retransmissions and the buffer size.