Data Channel Service for Wireless Telephone Links

Jani Kiiskinen, Markku Kojo, Mika Liljeberg, and Kimmo E. E. Raatikainen: Data Channel Service for Wireless Telephone Links. Report C-1996-1, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, January 1996. 17 pages. <http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/TR/C-1996/1>

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Abstract

The characteristics of wireless telephone links are quite different from those of wireline links. In particular, standard TCP/IP performs poorly in an environment where these links are combined. We have designed and implemented a communication architecture for the efficient operation over an internetwork consisting of fixed networks and wireless telephone networks. In our architecture the Mobile-Connection Host is the bridge between the wired and wireless networks. It allows us to transparently replace TCP/IP over the wireless medium with a special transport service called the Mowgli Data Channel Service (MDCS). The MDCS is designed to take into account long latencies, narrow bandwidth, highly variable transmission delays, and sudden disconnections. As a result, the MDCS significantly improves the fault tolerance and performance of communication over wireless telephone links. In this paper we describe the MDCS and its implementation as the Mowgli Data Channel Protocol (MDCP). We also give performance results and compare the performance of our approach to that of standard TCP/IP.

Index Terms

Categories and Subject Descriptors:
C.2.1, C.2.4, D.4.4

General Terms:

Additional Key Words and Phrases: mobility, wireless connections, cellular telephone