Energy consumption of TCP Reno, Newreno, and SACK in multi-hop wireless networks

ABSTRACT

In this paper we compare the energy consumption behavior of three versions of TCP --- Reno, Newreno, and SACK. The experiments were performed on a wireless testbed where we measured the energy consumed at the sender node. Our results indicate that, in most cases, using total energy consumed as the metric, SACK outperforms Newreno and Reno while Newreno performs better than Reno. The experiments emulated a large set of network conditions including variable round trip times, random loss, bursty loss, and packet reordering. We also estimated the idealized energy for each of the three implementations (i.e., we subtract out the energy consumed when the sender is idle) and here, surprisingly, we find that in many instances SACK performs poorly compared to the other two implementations. We conclude that if the mobile device has a very low idle power consumption then SACK is not the best implementation to use for bursty or random loss. On the other hand, if the idle power consumption is significant, then SACK is the best choice since it has the lowest overall energy consumption.

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