Performance evaluation of TCP and UDP during LTE handover

Abstract

LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been standardized in 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) to provide higher data throughput as well as lower latency for various IP based services including web browsing, VoIP (Voice over IP), video streaming and so on. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of TCP and UDP when handover is executed in an LTE system. The performance is degraded due to the interference between source and target eNBs (evolved NodeB). Also the handover interruption time negatively affects overall performance. We measure the TCP throughput and the transmission delay of UDP during the handover process by using our indoor and outdoor LTE testbeds. The results show that better TCP throughput performance is obtained by decreasing the A3-offset and the interruption time caused by a handover event is around 80ms.