Simulation study of TCP proxy in multi-connectivity enabled 5G mmWave network

Abstract

With the rapid growth in mobile data traffic, 5G communication has been emerging. 5G communication utilizes mmWave links owing to its large bandwidth, but the high-frequency spectrum is not as reliable as the sub-6GHz bands. This is critical to TCP traffic because the network can not distinguish between link errors from network congestion. Multi-connectivity is a promising technology that provides link robustness at the network level. Meanwhile, TCP proxy, an intermediate node that accelerates TCP, can improve TCP throughput in high speed communication with mmWave link. Even though TCP performance in mmWave networks improves by adopting multi-connectivity and TCP Proxy, there is no study that considers using these two together. We integrate the two schemes and simulate the operation of TCP proxy on the multi-connectivity enabled mmWave network using ns-3 simulation. From simulation results, we find that performance of TCP proxy depends on the location of proxy placement, backhaul delay, and buffer size.