Advocating a remote socket architecture for Internet access using wirelessLANs

One challenge in the development of telecommunication networks is the seaml ess integration of wireless devices into the global Internet. Although it i s well known that the Internet protocols were designed for heterogeneous ne tworks an end-system with the usual Internet protocol stack will suffer an inefficient communication while connected via a wireless link. The protocol mechanisms of the transport layer can lead to poor performance in case of TCP and a high loss rate in case of UDP. In this paper we advocate a Remote Socket Architecture (ReSoA) which is a kind of proxy-oriented architecture for wireless Internet access in Wireless LAN environment. This approach al lows the use of a thin protocol stack on the wireless end-system to save sc arce resources and a tailored protocol for the wireless link without breaki ng the original TCP semantics. We show the suitability of ReSoA by comparin g its performance with that of pure TCP and Berkeley Snoop through actual m easurements in a test environment.