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Snooping TCP As A Transparent TCP Extension

Snooping TCP is a transparent TCP extension that allows a foreign agent to buffer packets sent to a mobile host, snoop the TCP packet flow in both directions, and locally retransmit packets if losses are detected on the wireless link. This preserves the end-to-end TCP semantic while enabling faster retransmissions than relying on the correspondent host. It does not require changes to the mobile host or correspondent host and works seamlessly when the mobile host moves to another foreign agent. However, it does not fully isolate wireless link behavior and assumes the mobile host can handle negative acknowledgements. It also may not work if end-to-end encryption hides the TCP headers.

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Krishanu Modak
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305 views

Snooping TCP As A Transparent TCP Extension

Snooping TCP is a transparent TCP extension that allows a foreign agent to buffer packets sent to a mobile host, snoop the TCP packet flow in both directions, and locally retransmit packets if losses are detected on the wireless link. This preserves the end-to-end TCP semantic while enabling faster retransmissions than relying on the correspondent host. It does not require changes to the mobile host or correspondent host and works seamlessly when the mobile host moves to another foreign agent. However, it does not fully isolate wireless link behavior and assumes the mobile host can handle negative acknowledgements. It also may not work if end-to-end encryption hides the TCP headers.

Uploaded by

Krishanu Modak
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Snooping TCP

1. One of the drawbacks of I-TCP is the segmentation of the single TCP connection
into two TCP connections. This loses the original end-to-end TCP semantic. The
following TCP enhancement works completely transparently and leaves the TCP
end-to-end connection intact.

Snooping TCP as a transparent TCP extension

2. In this approach, the foreign agent buffers all packets with destination mobile
host and additionally ‘snoops’ the packet flow in both directions to recognize
acknowledgements.

3. The reason for buffering packets toward the mobile node is to enable the
foreign agent to perform a local retransmission in case of packet loss on the
wireless link.

4. The foreign agent buffers every packet until it receives an acknowledgement


from the mobile host. If the foreign agent does not receive an acknowledgement
from the mobile host with in a certain amount of time, either the packet or the
acknowledgement has been lost.

5. Now the foreign agent retransmits the packet directly from the buffer,
performing a much faster retransmission compared to the correspondent host.

6. The foreign agent may discard duplicates of packets already retransmited


locally and acknowledged by the mobile host. This avoids unnecessary traffic on
the wireless link.
7. Data transfer from the mobile host with destination correspondent host works
as follows.
(a) The foreign agent snoops in to the packet stream to detect gaps in the sequence
numbers of TCP.
(b) As soon as the foreign agent detects a missing packet , it returns a negative
acknowledgement (NACK) to the mobile host.
(c) The mobile host can now retransmit the missing packet immediately.

Extending the functions of a foreign agent with this TCP has several advantages:
1. The end-to-end TCP semantic is preserved. The approach automatically falls
back to standard TCP if the enhancements stop working.

2. The correspondent host does not need to be changed; most of the enhancements
are in the foreign agent. Supporting only the packet stream from the correspondent host
to the mobile host does not even require changes in the mobile host.

3. It does not need a handover of state as soon as the mobile host moves to
another foreign agent. All that happens is a time-out at the correspondent host and
retransmission of the packets, possibly already to the new care-of address

4. It does not matter if the next foreign agent uses the enhancement or not. If not,
the approach automatically falls back to the standard solution.

However, the simplicity of the scheme also results in some disadvantages:


1. Snooping TCP does not isolate the behavior o f the wireless link as well as I-
TCP. The quality of the isolation, which snooping TCP offers, strongly depends on the
quality of the wireless link, time-out values, and further traffic characteristics.

2. Using negative acknowledgements between the foreign agent and the mobile
host assumes additional mechanisms on the mobile host. This approach is no longer
transparent for arbitrary mobile hosts.

3. All efforts for snooping and buffering data may be useless if certain encryption
schemes are applied end-to-end between the correspondent host and mobile host . Using
IP encapsulation security payload the TCP protocol header will be encrypted – snooping
on the sequence numbers will no longer work. If encryption is used above the transport
layer (e.g., SSL/ TLS) snooping TCP can be used.

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