Adapting TCP segment size in cellular networks

In cellular networks, a frame size is generally made small to reduce the impact of errors. Thus, a segment of transport layer is splitted into multiple frames before transmission. A problem is that the whole segment is lost when a frame of a segment is lost. So, the segment error rate tends to be high even though the cellular network provides relatively the low frame error rate, which drops TCP performance. However, the relation between the frame size, the segment size and the error rate has not been closely investigated. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the segment size on TCP performance in cellular networks and propose a scheme alleviating the performance drop of TCP. Our result shows that our scheme reduces the drop by 82%.