TCP performance in wireless access with adaptive modulation and coding

We study a wireless access system with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer, finite-length queuing at the data link layer and a TCP protocol at the transport layer. We analyze the end-to-end TCP performance via a fixed-point procedure, that effectively couples TCP with the AMC-based wireless link. Guided by the performance analysis, we present a simple cross-layer design, which optimizes the target packet error rate in AMC at the physical layer, so that the TCP throughput at the transport layer is maximized.