TCP performance over 5G mmWave links — Tradeoff between capacity and latency

Abstract

Recently, 5G systems started to explore the usage of mmWave bands both for access and backhaul. Cellular systems operating at such frequencies would achieve a significantly higher capacity than current systems due to the large frequency block available. Due to the propagation characteristics, highly directional mmWave links may frequently switch between Line-of-sight, Non Line-of-sight and outage if the beam is blocked by obstacles. Such intermittent connectivity combined with high throughput causes TCP to perform very badly. In this paper, we study the performance of several TCP variants over intermittent mmWave links. We focus on latency aspects, use ns-3 with extensions for mmWave links and evaluate the TCP performance with real Linux TCP stacks using the Direct Code Execution (DCE) framework. We also investigate the benefit of bufferbloat solutions such as CoDel, with different TCP variants. We investigate the impact of CoDels configuration parameters and different RTTs on TCP throughput, fairness and queueing delay. The problem of slow recovery of TCP after NLOS periods is less pronounced when multiple flows coexist under CoDel only if some of the flows have very short RTTs. However, under presence of NLOS, the fairness between different flows with different RTT values is reduced.