  The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was designed to provide reliable
transport services in wired networks. In such networks, packet losses mainly
occur due to congestion. Hence, TCP was designed to apply congestion avoidance
techniques to cope with packet losses. Nowadays, TCP is also utilized in
wireless networks where, besides congestion, numerous other reasons for packet
losses exist. This results in reduced throughput and increased transmission
round-trip time when the state of the wireless channel is bad. We propose a new
network layer, that transparently sits below the transport layer and hides non
congestion-imposed packet losses from TCP. The network coding in this new layer
is based on the well-known class of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes.
