Handbook of Information Security, Volume 1, Key Concepts, Infrastructure, Standards, and Protocols

TCP over Wireless Links

Mohsen Guizani and Anupama Raju, Western Michigan University

Introduction

Congestion Avoidance and Control

Slow Start

Congestion Avoidance

Fast Retransmit

Fast Recovery

TCP over Wireless

Limitations in a Wireless Network

TCP Performance in a Wireless Network

Classification of Proposed Schemes

Proposed Schemes for Wireless TCP

Pure Link-Level Approaches

Soft-State Transport-Layer Caching Approaches

Soft-State Cross-Layer Signaling Approaches

Hard-State Transport Layer Approaches

Pure End-to-End Transport-Level Approaches

Security

Security Issues

Possible Attacks

Standards in Wireless Networks

Threats to TCP

SYN Flooding

Sequence Number Attack

TCP Session Hijacking

TCP FIN and RST Bit Attacks

Land Attack

Security Protocols

Conclusion

Glossary

Cross References

References

INTRODUCTION

The transport layer is the basic end-to-end building block of the Internet (TCP/IP) architecture and communications. Protocols above the transport layer concentrate on distributed applications processing, and protocols below the transport layer concentrate on the transmission, routing, and forwarding of application data. The transmission control protocol is a connection-oriented, reliable, byte stream service that provides data transfer that is reliable, ordered, fully duplex, robust, and flow controlled (Network Sorcery, n.d.; Rey, 1981)

Each TCP segment (shown in Figure 1) contains the source and destination port number to identify the sending and receiving application. A socket ...