Performance of TCP over UMTS common and dedicated channels

摘要

Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third-generation cellular network that enables high-speed wireless Internet access. This paper investigates the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over UMTS utilizing a common and four dedicated transport channels with bit rates up to 2 Mb/s. The performance of TCP was examined under varying channel conditions. Bulk data transfer and interactive traffic was considered in the simulation. The simulation results show that the behaviour of TCP is closely coupled to the UMTS radio link control layer. A maximum TCP throughput is achievable for transport channels with bit rates up to 384 kb/s. The gain in request-response time for interactive traffic is relatively small for high bit rate channels because the UMTS radio interface is latency limited for small object sizes.