HTTP Problem LTE
HTTP Problem LTE
1 Introduction
R. Szabó and A. Vidács (Eds.): EUNICE 2012, LNCS 7479, pp. 263–274, 2012.
c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2012
264 V. Farkas, B. Héder, and Sz. Nováczki
2 Related Work
The concept and practical benefits of PEPs was in main focus of several research
projects during the last decade. Many research papers investigate the split con-
nection TCP proxy concept applied in case of satellite links that have high RTT
[8], ad-hoc networks with high bit error rate links [18], as well as in case of
transport infrastructures for reliable overlay multicast networks [15]. Lately sev-
eral studies investigate the potential benefits of using the split TCP concept in
wireless [27,13,22] and in particular in cellular networks [14]. The authors in [19]
give a comprehensive overview of split connection TCP proxies in Wideband
Code Division Multiple Access networks and show that this solution can signif-
icantly improve the throughput of file downloads, while in [21] the performance
A Split Connection TCP Proxy in LTE Networks 265
The LTE system is structured into four high level domains (as depicted in Figure
1): User Equipment (UE), Evolved UMTS Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN),
Evolved Packet Core (EPC), and the Services domain [12]. The UE, E-UTRAN
and EPC form the Internet Protocol (IP) Connectivity Layer, with the main
function to provide IP based connectivity. E-UTRAN consists of the evolved
Node Bs (eNBs). The EPC consists of the Mobility Management Entity (MME),
which is the control plane functional element, and the SAE-GW (consisting of
the Serving-GW and Packet-GW), which is the user plane gateway to the E-
UTRAN. The Services domain consists of subsystems that provide the various
operator services or grants access to the external services such as those available
on the Internet. The UEs are connected to the eNBs via the air (Uu) interface.
eNBs are connected to the SAE-GW via the S1-U and to the MME via the S1-C
interface. The MME and the SAE gateway communicate with each other via
the S11 interface. User traffic is carried via the S1-U interface through General
Packet Radio Service Tunneling Protocol (GTP) tunnels, whereas control plane
traffic via the S1-C interface. The eNBs are interconnected via the X2 interface
that is used in order to transfer the handover related user and control plane
traffic.
Fig. 2. Duration of TCP connection setup (t1 an t2 ) and data transfer in slow start
phase (t3 and t4 ) with and without TCP proxy
4 Simulation Results
LTE network was created which simulates an urban environment with pedestrian
users and average radio conditions. All simulations were executed in this refer-
ence LTE network. The radio network layout of the reference LTE network was
designed according to the double ring network topology [1]; the 7 eNBs of the in-
ner ring were serving the traffic, the outer ring of eNBs were added only for in-
terference generation. In Figure 3 the topology of the reference LTE network is
depicted. The 7 eNBs were connected to the SAE-GW through IP routers, which
were connected via 100 Mbit/s Ethernet links with 10 ms media delay. The IP
routers used the Random Early Detection (RED) queue management technique
[10]. Each CS was connected through 100 Mbit/s Ethernet links with a fix delay
to the SAE-GW, this delay is referred as the mean Internet delay in the rest of the
paper. Each simulation case was executed with and without TCP proxy.
In the simulation environment the protocols of the S1-U and LTE-Uu inter-
face are implemented in detail. The air interface is based on 3GPP 25.814 [1]. A
single input single output channel with two times 10 MHz bandwidth is consid-
ered. Each eNB is simulated with a one cell one sector configuration, having an
omni-directional antenna. The mobility model is random way-point, inter-site
handover procedures are implemented. The channel quality is simulated sepa-
rately for each user considering distance loss, shadowing, multipath fading, and
penetration loss.
Three key Internet applications were used as benchmark applications in order
to evaluate the performance impacts of a TCP proxy in an LTE network: FTP
based file transfer (bulk data transfer), HTTP traffic (web browsing) and video
streaming. These three applications are implemented in detail in the simulation
environment. Each user had one of these three applications running during the
simulations. The TCP proxy was implemented in detail with two TCP variants:
New Reno and CUBIC. TCP New Reno [9] is also referred as standard TCP
because it is the most well-known TCP variant. TCP CUBIC [11] was developed
for networks with high bandwith-delay product and it is the current default TCP
variant of the Linux operating system so it is used by a large number of content
servers and Android mobile devices.
A Split Connection TCP Proxy in LTE Networks 269
FTP users initiate a file download with unlimited file size. The measured per-
formance indicator for FTP traffic is the average throughput and the fairness
of the TCP connections as defined by the Jain’s Fairness Index [23]. The Jain’s
Fairness Index of connections with equal throughput is 1; the higher is the differ-
ence in the throughput of different connections, the lower is the Jain’s Fairness
Index.
The simulation model of web browsing was based on HTTP/1.1. Pipelining,
which has a large impact on the performance of mobile browsing was also part
of the model [4]. The browser client was modeled based on a typical mobile web
browser. Web browsing users were acting according to the common web surfing
behavior: they selected a random web page from a set of popular sites, down-
loaded them and proceeded to another random page after a simulated reading
time. Web pages were selected from the top 20 sites of Alexa’s top 500 global
list [2]. The structure of these web sites (i.e., the number of embedded objects
and the size of the HTTP request and response with the address of the server
for each object) was recorded in September, 2011. This state was used in the
simulations so that Domain Name System (DNS) queries, HTTP requests and
HTTP responses could be simulated authentically. For HTTP users, the mea-
sured performance indicator is the mean page download time.
Video streaming was modeled with the web browsing model extended with
the relevant features of the HTML5 (the fifth version of the HyperText Markup
Language) standard. The downloaded video had a 512 kbit/s average video bit-
rate and it was 90 s long. Videos of this size are not transferred with server side
rate control [24]. The performance measure in this case is the user satisfaction:
during the simulations users were considered satisfied if the buffering time of the
video was shorter than eight seconds and the video playback was not interrupted
more than three times or for more than two seconds altogether.
4.5 1
New Reno w/o proxy
Mean throughput [Mbit/s]
Fig. 4. Average throughput and Jain’s Fairness Index for FTP data transfer with and
without a TCP proxy when the mean Internet delay is 50 ms
4.5 1
New Reno w/o proxy
Mean throughput [Mbit/s]
4
Jain's Fairness Index
Fig. 5. Average throughput and Jain’s Fairness Index for FTP data transfer with and
without a TCP proxy when the mean Internet delay is 75 ms
Figure 5 and 6 show the same diagrams for the cases where the mean Internet
delay is 75 and 125 ms. These figures indicate a moderate gain in throughput
under light and moderate congestion. The smaller gain of TCP proxy in the
not congested case is because the larger RTT between the CS and the SAE-
GW decreases the achievable maximum throughput on the corresponding TCP
loop of TCP proxy. The larger increase in the moderately congested case is
A Split Connection TCP Proxy in LTE Networks 271
4.5 1
New Reno w/o proxy
Mean throughput [Mbit/s]
Fig. 6. Average throughput and Jain’s Fairness Index for FTP data transfer with and
without a TCP proxy when the mean Internet delay is 125 ms
possible because the larger Internet delay degrades the achievable throughput of
the reference cases, thus the transport network become fully utilized at a higher
number of users per cell.
The performance of web browsing with and without a TCP proxy is presented
for the New Reno TCP variant. All HTTP simulations were repeated with the
CUBIC TCP variant as well but the performance difference between the two
variants was minimal, so those results are not shown. The investigated mean
Internet delay values were the same as for the FTP simulations. The congestion
level of the network was changed by adding background FTP downloads; in the
uncongested case, there were no background FTP downloads while 2 to 4 and 6
to 8 FTP downloads per cell simulated the moderately congested and congested
cases. Every HTTP simulation case was executed with 5 different random seeds.
Figure 7 (a) shows the mean download times when the mean Internet delay
was 50 ms. It is clear that the TCP proxy decreases the average download time
in all the investigated cases. As expected, the mean download time increases
when the transport gets more congested but there is a benefit of a TCP proxy
in those cases as well.
ϳ ϳ ϳ
Mean download time [s]
ϲ ϲ ϲ
ϱ ϱ ϱ
ϰ ϰ ϰ
ϯ ϯ ϯ
Ϯ Ϯ Ϯ
ϭ ϭ ϭ
w/o proxy with proxy w/o proxy with proxy w/o proxy with proxy
Ϭ Ϭ Ϭ
Ϭ Ϯ ϰ ϲ ϴ Ϭ Ϯ ϰ ϲ ϴ Ϭ Ϯ ϰ ϲ ϴ
Background load Background load Background load
(# of FTP downloads per cell) (# of FTP downloads per cell) (# of FTP downloads per cell)
Fig. 7. Mean download time of web pages with and without a TCP proxy when the
mean Internet delay is (a) 50 ms, (b) 75 ms and (c) 125 ms
272 V. Farkas, B. Héder, and Sz. Nováczki
Fig. 8. The ratio of satisfactory and all video playbacks with and without a TCP proxy
when the mean Internet delay is (a) 50 ms, (b) 75 ms and (c) 125 ms
Figure 7 (b) and (c) shows the same diagrams for higher Internet delays. As ex-
pected, the average download time increases with the mean Internet delay.
However, TCP proxy can decrease the download time by the same amount (which
is obviously a smaller ratio compared to the value of the download time), there-
fore the performance gain of TCP proxy decreases in case of web browsing as well
when the Internet delay increases.
The performance of video streaming with and without TCP proxy is pre-
sented on Figure 8. The investigated conditions were the same as for the HTTP
simulations. Each simulation case contained 228 video downloads and they were
executed with 4 different random seeds, so from altogether 896 video downloads
a user satisfaction ratio was calculated. The figures indicate that TCP proxy
improves the user satisfaction ratio of video streaming in all the investigated
conditions. The improvement is more profound when the Internet delay or the
congestion level of the network is higher.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, it has been presented how the split connection TCP proxy con-
cept can be used in LTE networks. Furthermore, it has been evaluated how the
SAE-GW based TCP proxy affects the performance of bulk data transfer, web
browsing and video download. Numerical results show that the TCP proxy can
considerably increase the performance of web browsing and video download in
all investigated conditions. TCP proxy is also able to significantly increase the
performance of bulk data transfer if the transport network is not congested;
however, there is no improvement when the transport is already fully utilized
and the TCP proxy can even decrease the fairness in this case.
A possible extension of the work presented in this paper could be the evalua-
tion of the eNB based TCP proxy solution. The study of the combined solution
(two TCP proxies, one in the eNB and another in the SAE-GW) could also be an
interesting follow-up topic. An additional research topic could be the fine tuning
A Split Connection TCP Proxy in LTE Networks 273
of the TCP parameters of the TCP proxy (e.g. initial window size) in a static
or an adaptive way based on current network conditions.
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