A split connection TCP proxy in LTE networks

Abstract

High quality and ubiquitous Internet access is a key feature of today's mobile systems such as LTE. While LTE can provide competitive peak data rates and a relatively low latency, there is still room for solutions improving end-users' Quality-of-Experience by optimizing services running over the LTE infrastructure. Being the most widespread transport protocol, TCP is in the main focus of such research projects. A widely recommended solution for TCP performance improvement is the split connection TCP proxy that divides the end-to-end TCP connection into two independent connections, that results increased throughput and faster error recovery. This paper investigates the performance of a split connection TCP proxy deployed in LTE's SAE-GW. Numerical results show significant performance improvement of file downloading, web browsing and video steaming applications in case of not congested transport networks. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.