UDP is the standard best effort transport layer protocol. A well known problem with UDP is that, unlike TCP, it does not include congestion control. Thus UDP connections have no way to detect or react to network congestion. This is particularly a problem in wireless networks, where a significant loss in achievable capacity occurs when using UDP transport over a congested multi hop network running the 802.11 MAC and energy is wasted on transmitting packets that will be dropped before reaching their destination. Mobile ad hoc networks lack energy and bandwidth. Therefore, it is necessary to use congestion control to improve the network performance while using UDP as the transport layer protocol. In this paper, we explore the use of UDP with congestion control, and our simulations show that adding congestion control to best effort traffic can improve the network capacity greatly and increase energy efficiency dramatically.
UDP, TCP, MAC
