  The advent of fourth generation technologies in wireless networks and the
rapid growth of 3G have heralded an era that will require researchers to find
reliable and easily implement-able solutions to the problem of poor TCP
performance in the wireless environment. Since a large part of the Internet is
TCP-based, solving this problem will be instrumental in determining if the move
from wired to wireless will be seamless or not. This paper proposes a scheme
that uses the base station's ability to predict the time at which the link may
be going down and to estimate the period for which the mobile would be
unreachable due to conditions like fading. By using cross-layer and ACK pacing
algorithms, the base station prevents the fixed host from timing out while
waiting for ACKs from the mobile. This in turn prevents TCP on the fixed host
from bringing down the throughput drastically due to temporary network
conditions, caused by mobility or the unreliability of wireless links.
Experimental results indicate a reasonable increase in throughput when the ACK
holding scheme is used.
