The performance of the WWW traffic due to interactions between TCP and RLP protocols in a cellular system
Zoran Kostić · 2002
We investigate the performance of the WWW traffic due to the interactions between the transmission control protocols (TCP) and radio link protocols (RLPs) of various reliability. The study is done from the perspective of a cellular service operator, interested in maximizing the overall system performance. We implemented simulations of a spectrally-efficient cellular system based on the EDGE standard with numerous simultaneous users, each generating WWW packet traffic and operating the RENO TCP protocol. Due to the interference-limited nature of the system, the users experience over-the-air interactions similar to those of the congestion channel for which the TCP is suitable. The simulations indicate that tuning the retransmission persistence of the RLP protocol has a notable impact on the system performance. It is noted that the system performance when the TCP is used is not significantly worse when compared to the pure link layer performance.