3 Vijaynarayanan Subramanian Shivkumar Kalyanaraman K.K. Ramakrishnan 2006 In Proceedings of MILCOM 06, IEEE Military Communications Conference Washington D.C, USA 10/23/2006 As the Joint forces move towards the vision of network-centric warfare (NCW), it is extremely important that the network services be reliable and dependable, even under degraded network conditions. Tactical wireless and satellite based networks are prone to disruptions over multiple time-scales: bursty bit errors and packet loss (small time-scale), interference, jamming and capture effects (medium time-scale) and long-term path disruptions due to persistent channel impairments and mobility (large time-scale). TCP does not work well over such channels because it misinterprets erasure for congestion, and its reliability mechanisms become untargeted when there are disruptions. Large round-trip-times (RTT) as in satellite networks, and uncoordinated optimizations at multiple layers (PHY, MAC and transport) lead to poor performance. In this paper we describe LT-TCP, a robust transport protocol (improving TCP) that is applicable for extreme wireless environments including a mix of multi-hop ad-hoc meshed networks (MANETs), airborne networks and satellite networks. LT-TCP uses an adaptive, end-to-end hybrid ARQ/FEC reliability strategy and ECN for incipient congestion detection. The novelty lies in our adaptive methods that respond to learning about the underlying random packet loss and disruption process. The overhead of FEC or smaller segments is imposed just-in-time and targeted to maximize the performance benefit (measured as improved goodput and timeout reduction) even when the path characteristics are uncertain. We show that LT-TCP substantially improves performance over regular TCP even for packet loss rates of up to 40\% - 50\%, thus substantially extending the dynamic performance range of TCP over lossy wireless networks. http://poisson.ecse.rpi.edu/~vijay/web/work/milcom.pdf