Algorithms for congestion control in LTE mobile networks

Abstract

In the modern cellular data networks, with the tremendous amount of mobile devices, the constantly decreasing prices of the hardware and according the trends worldwide, provisioning of the data service and its quality will soon become an impossible task. Since current mobile cellular standards are unable to serve and meet the needs of this increase, the network will eventually become congested. As we are investigating data networks, they are based on the TCP protocol. TCP has various congestion control schemes used in both wired and wireless network, such as Cubic, Vegas, Reno, etc. Most modern cellular systems have already been migrated to 3G and 4G, so it could be very useful to identify which algorithm performs best in LTE (4G) wireless network. As most of the platforms for mobile devices, such as phones and tablets are unix/linux based and the current default algorithm in Linux is Cubic, the focus in this article will be on real-time modification and testing of the congestion control parameters of TCP CUBIC.