Measurement Analysis of TCP Congestion Control Algorithms in LTE Uplink

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of user generated contents yielded by the proliferation of social networks applications, cellular based video surveillance and device-to-device (D2D) communication, makes the cellular uplink communication an attractive topic. In this paper we conduct a systematic evaluation and measurement analysis to characterize cellular uplink traffic and compare its interplay with different TCP congestion control algorithms (CCA), namely NewReno, Cubic, and BBR, in both stationary and mobility scenarios. The evaluation encompasses average throughput, average round trip time (RTT), fairness among simultaneous flows, and packet retransmission. The intended behavior of BBR has been observed in LTE uplink, but some severe issues such as lack of fairness among simultaneous flows and massive on device packet losses have been observed. It is observed that the lack of fairness among simultaneous flows can unpredictably change the throughput of multi-flow applications.