The basic wireless model that we assume for our analysis and design comprises of a source host which is connected to a base station by a fixed wireline network, and a wireless host, which is just a single hop from the base station. We also assume that the mobile, wireless host receives all its packets through the base station only (ie. it has no other network connectivity). This assumption is not overtly optimistic in the light of the suggestions made in Mobile IP extensions [8] where each mobile host is maintained by a foreign or a home agent in its geographical location, which is responsible for forwarding all packets to it.
Any packets lost between the source and the base station is solely due to network congestion, and any packets dropped by the wireless link is due to the channel noise and bit-error rates. For our purposes, we make the assumption that the connecting base station of the wireless host does not change. In this project we do not look at the changes that are needed to ensure proper handoff between base stations. Also, we assume that the source is aware that the other end of the connection is a wireless host. This helps in making better optimizations since the higher layers (like TCP) can now adapt using this extra knowledge.