A Model for Behavioral Tendency of TCP Congestion Control Variants in LTE Cellular and 802.11ac Networks

Abstract

As a reliable protocol, TCP protocol configuration requires many parameters to be set before the actual packet transmissions happen. However, the TCP parameters need to be changed from the initial fixed default values to suit the network requirements since it is utilized on many dissimilar mobile networks, including the LTE cellular and the 802.11ac. On the other hand, LTE cellular and 802.11ac networks also have their own design parameters. In this case, utilizing the TCP in these networks will result in the TCP parameters to interact with LTE and 802.11ac parameters, which subsequently can optimize or degrade the network performance due to correct or poor parameters setting. Therefore, it is highly important to determine the correct values for both protocol parameters and network parameters to achieve optimal network performance. This work presents a model to determine the interaction between the TCP protocol parameters, including the congestion control variants and the size of packets and network parameters that include RLC modes in LTE and A-MPDU aggregation mechanism in 802.11ac. Drawn from an extensive set of scenarios and experiments, the results show significant performance improvements achieved by the verified matching parameters.