On Experiments with a Transport Protocol for Pervasive Computing Environments

It is well-known that TCP performs poorly in a wireless environment. This paper presents an empirical performance analysis of TCP on cellular digital packet data, Bluetooth and wireless LAN. We also present 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. The application used to perform all the experiments is typical of common applications that would use these protocols and network technologies. Typical mobile devices used in the experiments included Palm Pilots. We present results of performance evaluation of TCP and CentaurusComm on different wireless technologies.