TCP in 5G mmWave Networks: Link Level Retransmissions and MP-TCP

Abstract

MmWave communications, one of the cornerstones of future 5G mobile networks, are characterized at the same time by a potential multi-gigabit capacity and by a very dynamic channel, sensitive to blockage, wide fluctuations in the received signal quality, and possibly also sudden link disruption. While the performance of physical and MAC layer schemes that address these issues has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, the complex interactions between mmWave links and transport layer protocols such as TCP are still relatively unexplored. This paper uses the ns-3 mmWave module, with its channel model based on real measurements in New York City, to analyze the performance of the Linux TCP/IP stack (i) with and without link-layer retransmissions, showing that they are fundamental to reach a high TCP throughput on mmWave links and (ii) with Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) over multiple LTE and mmWave links, illustrating which are the throughput-optimal combinations of secondary paths and congestion control algorithms in different conditions.

arXiv comment6 pages, 11 figures, accepted for presentation at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)

References in corpus (4)

• Millimeter Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges
• Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective
• Improved Handover Through Dual Connectivity in 5G mmWave Mobile Networks
• Multipath TCP: Analysis, Design and Implementation

Cited by in corpus (6)

• End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks
• X-TCP: A Cross Layer Approach for TCP Uplink Flows in mmWave Networks
• milliProxy: a TCP Proxy Architecture for 5G mmWave Cellular Systems
• Multi-Sector and Multi-Panel Performance in 5G mmWave Cellular Networks
• Integration of Carrier Aggregation and Dual Connectivity for the ns-3 mmWave Module
• An Open Framework to Model Diffraction by Dynamic Blockers in Millimeter Wave Simulations