Impact of Doppler spread and adaptive modulation on TCP throughput in Rayleigh fading channels

A number of wireless systems have recently adopted adaptive modulation (AM) schemes to improve its efficiency. In this letter, our aim is to study the impact Doppler spread and adaptive modulation has on transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput in Rayleigh fading channels. We consider a finite state Markov channel (FSMC) model, which is a useful model for analyzing radio channel with nonindependent fading. Furthermore, we use a Markov model for TCP evolution and evaluate the TCP performance by computer simulations. In our simulations we have compared the TCP Reno scheme with TCP Tahoe scheme. The results indicate that a large Doppler spread leads to lower TCP throughput due to more frequent transitions of channel states and modulation schemes which make it difficult for the TCP congestion control mechanism to accommodate the dynamic link characteristics.