Adapting wireless links to support standard network protocols

Wireless environments present significant challenges to the operation of many of today's networking protocols. This paper explores how the wireless problem domain can be represented as a design space of a few independent variables, namely: reliability, latency, and bandwidth. These variables can be chosen in such a way as to match the wireless environment to the needs of the data being communicated. We select a single type of data, TCP bulk data transfer, and illustrate how the operating point in the design space is chosen. A simulation is presented which demonstrates that by matching the operating point in the wireless problem domain design space to the expectations of the data, much better performance is realized.