Impact of traffic burst on the behavior of TCP variants for different LTE downlink schedulers

Abstract

In LTE network, the downlink resource scheduling process plays a vital role in enhancing the system performance and satisfy the end user quality of experience. However, the performance of system is not only confined to the single layer of LTE protocol stack, but there is also a correlation between the traffic dynamics and resource allocation decision. The study has been conducted to understand how the various combination of scheduling algorithms and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) variants affects the performance of LTE network. This paper also investigates the effects of scheduling decision during traffic burst conditions with different TCP variants on the overall performance of the LTE network. In addition to that, the adverse effect of low and high queue space of users at eNodeB on TCP performance is also studied. The simulation results show that combination of H-TCP with PSS scheduler gives the highest throughput and TCP Vegas with PSS scheduler takes less end to end delay as well as Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF) compared to other TCP variants. By taking overall system performance parameter, TCP Westwood performs better in all combination with schedulers.