A key objective for 3G wireless networks, such as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), is the explicit support for data communications for mobile users.
Today, the dominant transport protocol in the Internet is the Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Since TCP was not tailored for wireless networks, there are some performance issues occurring when TCP traffic is transferred over a UMTS radio link.
In this paper, the characteristics of TCP and UMTS are specified and the problems of TCP over UMTS dedicated channels (DCHs) are analyzed. The problem is high delays implying low utilization of allocated resources for small file transfers or due to packet losses. High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA)’s potential to solve the problem is studied.
Since in HSDPA, High-Speed Downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) is introduced as an alternative of DCH on downlink packet access, a model of HS-DSCH is built and simulations are performed in order to compare its TCP performance with DCH. The focus is on studying retransmission delay and Block Error Rate (BLER) targets.
Some scheduling methods are also compared. The results indicate that HS-DSCH gives better TCP performance than a DCH, and that advanced scheduling methods gives similar result as round robin if there are packet losses. Moreover, a somewhat surprising result is found regarding fast retransmission and channel utilization for increasing BLER targets.
Source: KTH
Author: Wang, Xiaoxin
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