fasp vs. FTP on 802.11 Wireless

802.11 Wi-Fi and fixed wireless networks are proliferating. However the promise of uploading/downloading personal data, large email attachments, or images from a mobile endpoint is limited today by the poor performance of TCP-based file transfers over wireless links. File transfers using conventional FTP or HTTP over wireless achieve a fraction of the specified capacity and are prone to wide variations in throughput and early terminations, depending on the link quality. Early experiments show that FASP improves the throughput of file transfers over standard 802.11 a/b/g connections by a factor 1.5 -2 and is more robust to the changes in link quality due to roaming or other traffic. As shown in the graph below, FTP throughputs and transfer times vary by +/-20% while FASP runs faster and at a steady rate. The FASP throughput and reliability advantage over standard file transfer may become even more necessary as wideband wireless enters the mainstream.