End-to-end evaluation of WWW and file transfer performance for UMTS-TDD

Wireless data is deemed as a major booster of next generation wireless networks. In this context, the support of Internet applications based on the TCP still presents several open issues. The aim of this work is to evaluate the performance of TCP data transfer over the UMTS TD-CDMA air interface, by means of a rather detailed simulation model. The evaluation includes both bulk FTP like data transfer and interactive client-server (WWW) traffic. The distinctive point of view is exploring the interaction between application and transport level protocol functions and lower layers protocols over the radio interface. The interplay of radio access and fixed core network impairments is analyzed as well. Major results deal with balancing the error recovery performance of the RLC against the radio channel correlation and the fixed network impairments.