Performance evaluation of TCP over WCDMA RLC

Abstract

TCP congestion control has been developed on the assumption that congestion in the network is the only cause of packet loss. Under this assumption, it performs reasonably well over wired environment. However, in the presence of high error rates and intermittent connective characteristic of wireless link, TCP suffers from significant throughput degradation over hybrid wireless networks. Therefore TCP needs to be modified or supported by other protocols to run properly over networks that contain wireless links. One of these methods is link ARQ and this is necessary to lossy links. Some considerations exists for ARQ protocols to support TCP traffics. This paper examines the TCP performance over WCDMA RLC, which provides ARQ function over wireless links.