Measurements and analyses of transmission control protocol's performance for dynamic link adaptation of general packet radio service

Muzalina, Zakaria (2009) Measurements and analyses of transmission control protocol's performance for dynamic link adaptation of general packet radio service. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS).

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Abstract

GPRS service providers continually optimising the performance of their GPRS networks and services for the benefits of the end users. One of Malaysia's GPRS service providers opted to increase the existing GPRS data rates by employing GPRS coding schemes CS1 to CS4, upgraded from coding schemes CS1 to CS2, in the GPRS link adaptation process. For the implementation of GPRS link adaptation and the increase in GPRS data rates by means of higher GPRS coding schemes, there has not been any measurement done on live network to the best of our knowledge, to quantify and compare TCP's performance with regards to these factors. The performance of TCP protocol in particular, reflects the GPRS' performance in many ways than realised since GPRS provides access to Internet applications that mostly run on TCP. This thesis presents the measurements, evaluation and comparison on TCP's performance in the link adaptation process during the deployment of GPRS CS 1 and CS2 coding schemes and after the activation of two more coding schemes, CS3 and CS4. The measurements are taken under various network scenarios based on users' physical locations in a live GPRS network. End-to-end FTP file transfer application is used for the assessment together with tracing at the GPRS air interface. The results show that the average throughput is increased by 23% for urban areas owing to the activation of higher coding schemes and aided by tuning of TCP's parameters. It is also shown that bad radio condition is the main factor affecting throughput. TCP's performance is seen to be almost constant in all scenarios and do not vary much between the two different link adaptation processes due to the underlying poor radio quality experienced. Overall, TCP works well in the link adaptation process and it can cope with GPRS mobility and bad radio condition, although at the expense of reduced throughput.

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