Title
Practical experience with TCP over GPRS
Abstract
We present the results of a series of experiments used to characterise the performance of a GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) wireless data network, hence highlighting issues that software architects should consider when designing applications to run over this soon to be widely-deployed service. In summary, we show that packet round trip time (RTTs) are large (>1000 ms) and can be highly variable, packet losses are relatively rare, and that available bandwidth can be quite variable. These network characteristics do not interact well with current TCP implementations. We show how it takes many seconds before a new TCP connection can expand its congestion window to make use of the full bandwidth available, leading to very poor performance of protocols like HTTP. Beyond the point of full bandwidth utilisation, TCP continues to expand the window needlessly, resulting in excessive queueing at the GPRS router. This leads to greatly inflated RTTs (10s of seconds) and hence poor interactive response and slow recovery should loss occur. We show how a simple transparent proxy interposed between the fixed and GPRS networks can be used to significantly improve TCP connection performance, particularly for activities like Web browsing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1109/GLOCOM.2002.1188483
Global Telecommunications Conference, 2002. GLOBECOM '02. IEEE
Keywords
Field
DocType
3G mobile communication,cellular radio,data communication,packet radio networks,transport protocols,3G UMTS,GPRS router,General Packet Radio Service,HTTP,TCP,TCP connection performance,Universal Mobile Telecommunications System,Web browsing,bandwidth utilisation,cellular telephony,congestion window,interactive response,network characteristics,packet losses,packet round trip time,protocols,transparent proxy,wireless data network
GPRS core network,TCP Westwood plus,Computer science,Computer network,Real-time computing,TCP acceleration,Zeta-TCP,TCP tuning,Access Point Name,TCP global synchronization,TCP Friendly Rate Control
Conference
Volume
ISBN
Citations 
2
0-7803-7632-3
47
PageRank 
References 
Authors
4.46
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rajiv Chakravorty149947.06
Joel Cartwright2474.46
Ian Pratt35420506.92