PROPOSAL

Title: Comparative Study of QoS in LTE vs. 2G & 3G Networks ABSTRACT Telecom networks have increasingly become the network choice for communication in an evergrowing globalized world. However the technology is fraught with a lot of cons. Due to the ever evolving nature of the technology underlying telecom networks still has a lot of issues relating to quality which needs dealing with. The core network of every network infrastructure is an area of very high speed which amongst other things greatly determines the overhead efficiency of the network. The quality of voice and data services is a very important area which network providers spare no expense in trying to optimize. Quality of Service (QoS) is the term used to aggregate the overall performance of a network. For telecom networks to be very efficient, one of the very important issues needed to be dealt withby the network provider is QoS at the aggregate end of the network. A model was developed which was used to compare three very important networking technologies; LTE, 2G & 3G, with a view of developing benchmarks which will be used by network engineers and scientists to deploy solution technology at the core end of the network with the ultimate aim of providing optimal QoS infrastructures at the core.

INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview

In practice, the term telecommunication covers all form of distance and conversion of the original communication including radio, telephony, telegraphy, television, data communication and computer networking. People often separate the communication of voice and data into two categories, using the term telecommunications to denote the transmission of voice signals and data communication to refer to the transmission of data signals (Cole, 2000). But generally, voice communication, data communication, and video communication all belong to the larger group or classification: telecommunication. The rapid growth of telecommunication networks has been witnessed from new services and emerging technologies in the past years especially data related services. As social and business activities rely increasingly on wireless communications, wireless access networks become crucial to providing the mobile users with un-tethered access to resources that reside primarily in data-only networks (e.g., the Internet, etc.). Typical telecom networks only provide voice-related services.

The increasing popularity of data technology indicates that telecom network links will play an important role in future inter-networks. 3G network is the most commonly available type of telecom transmission and backhaul network in existence today. TCP and Time Division

Multiplexing (for 2G networks) are the ubiquitous transport protocol used in the telecom world. TCP is a reliable transport protocol that is used to support applications like telnet, ftp and http. It is tuned to perform well in habitual networks made up of links with low bit-error rates. It runs above the connectionless Internet Protocol (IP) layer and provide a connection oriented end-to-end reliable delivery of application data. TCP was originally designed for wired networks, where loss of data is assumed to be due to congestion. A future model such as LTE seeks to increase the capacity and speed of wireless data networks using newer signal processing and modulation techniques based on an all-IP network. Networks with wireless and other lossy links also suffer from significant losses due to high bit error rates and handoff. But the assumption made by TCP, that loss of data is due to congestion in wireless environment causes degraded end-to-end performance. Hence a variety of mechanisms were proposed to improve TCP performance over wireless links. The proliferation of wireless networks into more complex environments has introduced many new demands upon the existing wireless protocols. Wireless systems are being asked to function in multiple types of environments. Currently there are two distinct types of wireless networks: cellular and ad-hoc. Although improvements have been made to both wireless models allowing them to function well in specific environments, neither system is presently robust enough to satisfy the demands of all environments. (Kevin, 2000) With emerging telecom network technologies, handheld devices and laptops have become very common. Most of these devices interconnect using wireless links. Some of the applications running on these devices require reliable data transfer. Transmission Control protocol (TCP) is

the most widely accepted reliable, connection-oriented, full duplex, byte stream transport level protocol that is in use today (Stevens, 1994). It is an end-to-end protocol in telecom networks that support flow and congestion control. There are millions of network applications that have already been built on top of TCP and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. It is important to improve its performance in wireless networks without any modification to the application interface provided by TCP on fixed hosts. This is the only way by which mobile devices communicating on wireless links can seamlessly integrate with the rest of the Internet.

Network congestion occurs when offered traffic load exceeds available capacity at any point in a network. In wireless networks, congestion causes overall channel quality to degrade and loss rates to rise, leads to buffer drops and increased delays (as in wired networks), and tends to be grossly unfair toward nodes whose data has to traverse a larger number of radio hops. Congestion control in wired networks is usually done using end-to-end and network-layer mechanisms acting in concert. However, this approach does not solve the problem in wireless networks because concurrent radio transmissions on different links interact with and affect each other, and because radio channel quality shows high variability over multiple time-scales.

Usually, a central tenet of the current Internet architecture is that congestion control is performed mainly by TCP at end hosts. However, as new applications (which may not deploy TCP for congestion control), e.g. continuous media applications, become widely deployed on the Internet, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to exclusively rely on end hosts to perform end-to-end

congestion control. It has been agreed upon that the network itself must now participate in congestion control and resource management.

1.2

Statement of the Problem

The next generation telecommunication networks are posited to support large scale data applications. Implementing end-to-end TCP in such networks faces two problems. First, it is well known that TCP cannot distinguish packet losses due to link failures and that due to network congestion. Second, TCP congestion control mechanism does not deal effectively with large amount of out-of-order packet retransmissions; this problem has actually received less attention in past literatures and research works.

Therefore, this project work presents a more effective mechanism that deals with the second problem of retransmission of large amount of out-of-order packets.

1.3

Aims and Objectives

The aim of this project work is to carry out a performance evaluation using QoS metrics such as TCP throughput and more over wireless links within LTE networks and 2G & 3G networks. The specific objectives are therefore: To simulate this new LTE-TCP congestion control model that takes care of the inherent problem of the present existing algorithms. To compare the performance of this model with existing TCP congestion control models such as those used in current 2G & 3G networks.

1.4

Methodology

With the research objectives in perspective, the execution of this study is divided into phases as follows: Reviewing existing TCP models and algorithms and taking note of their limitations Modifying both the sender and the receiver Class Agent and other related files. Simulation of this modified model using NS-2 simulator under Linux environment Performance comparison of the future LTE model with existing 2G & 3G schemes.

Congestion in this project is going to be monitored at the aggregate base station. This therefore has to do with congestion as a result of traffic flow between the aggregate base station and the radio base stations. It is a state of congestion recovery from an already congested network and making sure that after retransmitting lost packets, the congestion state is recovered from in the state of large out-oforder packets. This is how the design works.

1.5

Scope of Research

The performance of TCP depends on its congestion control mechanisms for packet loss experience in the network. The congestion control mechanism for congestion losses is not very effective for corruption losses, which are more prevalent in wireless networks. However, this work is limited to proving that the future LTE mechanism is more effective and reliable for dealing with large amount of out-of-order packet retransmission.

It however, does not offer a solution to the first problem of TCP not being able to distinguish between packet losses due to link failures and that due to network congestion. The problem is however described.

1.6

Justification

The assumption that statistical multiplexing can be used to improve the link utilization is that the users do not reach their peak rate simultaneously, but since the traffic demands are stochastic and cannot be predicted, congestion is usually termed to be unavoidable. Each of this has their own limitations and hence the need for the desire of better and more efficient congestion controls algorithms with greater throughput. Whenever the total input rate is greater than the output link capacity, congestion occurs. When the network becomes congested, the queue lengths may become very large in a short time, resulting in buffer overflows and cell loss. The congestion control algorithms respond to this by reducing the congestion window, thereby reducing the rate of flow of packets.

Implementing end-to-end TCP in such networks where large data application is desired presents the challenge of effectively dealing with the retransmission of large out-of-order packets. This is what this project work tends to problem. The reduction in congestion window is a necessity when network is experiencing congestion to avoid congestion collapse on the wireless cellular network. Congestion control is therefore necessary to ensure that users get the negotiated Quality of Service (QoS).

1.7

Report Layout

This entire project report is made up of five chapters. Chapter one is the introductory chapter and it provides the necessary background on congestion on a telecommunication network, as well as understanding TCP over wireless network. Also included in this chapter are statement of problem, aims and objectives, and scope of research and its justification, Chapter two is the literature review containing the TCP protocol structures, its various control algorithms and schemes; as well as description of the various congestion control mechanism and their limitations. Chapter three contains the project methodology, including both model description and model development. In Chapter four, the system design, implementation and simulation of the model, as well as the result and model analysis are shown. Finally in Chapter five, the conclusion and recommendation of future work on this project are presented.