Design of a novel transport layer protocol for disaster resilient information network

Abstract

This thesis presents a novel transport layer protocol to serve more connections during disaster situation. UDP does not offer any guarantee at all. On the other hand, existing TCP protocols are based on the concept of 100% guarantee. Our proposed approach exploits the bandwidth wasted due to the retransmission of missed packets to achieve the desired guarantee level. But during the disaster situation, serving more people and transferring more useful data become much more important than fulfilling the requirement of perfect transfer. For voice messages, sacrificing a little quality is fine instead of resending packets repeatedly in the heavily used communication networks during disaster situation. Our proposed approach allows a tolerance level up to which dropped packets are just ignored and handled with fake acknowledgement to make sure the sender keeps sending the packets as if the recipient already received the missing packets. This way, a minimal guarantee level can be achieved instead of 100%. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement using our proposed approach over the existing ones.