3 Vijaynarayanan Subramanian K.K. Ramakrishnan Shivkumar Kalyanaraman 2007 THE SECOND IEEE/Create-Net/ICST International Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and MiddlewaRE (COMSWARE) Bangalore, India 07/01/2007 Wireless links pose significant challenges in terms of achievable goodput and residual loss-rate. Our recent enhancements, called LT-TCP make TCP loss-tolerant in heavy/bursty erasure environments. Link-level protocols mitigate these problems by using a combination of FEC and ARQ but are insufficient when the channel experiences disruptions. When the underlying source of loss is interference (e.g., 802.11 environments), {\sc mac}-level mechanisms misinterpret interference as noise leading to poor scheduling (e.g., capture effects) and limit the benefit of transport layer mitigation efforts. We propose enhancements to link-level protocols that enable survival during disruptions. We explore an adaptive link-level strategy to export a small residual loss rate and bounded latency under high loss/ disruption conditions. We evaluate the proposed link-level enhancements, showing that the combination with LT-TCP helps achieve significant end-to-end performance gains. We also demonstrate the trade-off between reduced link layer residual loss (by increasing ARQ persistence) and transport layer timeouts. http://poisson.ecse.rpi.edu/~vijay/web/work/comwsare.pdf