Experimental and simulation investigation on the TCP performance for wireless broadband environment

Abstract

Next Generation Networks provide opportunities and challenges for data communication. In particular, the ever increasing bandwidth poses a major challenge to transport layer protocols such as TCP. In this paper the performance of TCP in large bandwidth delay networks, with particular regard to wireless network scenarios, is experimentally investigated. In particular we apply an accredited standard technique for end-user bandwidth evaluation in wireless access environments showing limitations in the bandwidth exploitation. This investigation shows how end-to-end bandwidth measurements depend strongly on the TCP implementation in a broadband access network. We also simulated the experimental environment by means of ns-3 code, reproducing the same experimental results. This simulation approach allows us to foresee scenarios that cannot be analyzed in laboratories and to investigate future 5G infrastructures.