Novel Schemes to prioritize the TCP ACK for throughput improvement in B4G and 5G networks

Abstract

Evolution in cellular wireless communication and standardization has brought out technological advancements in physical and medium access (MAC) layer protocol to scale the data rate on the air interface like in Long Term Evolution (LTE) or New Radio (NR) 3GPP standards, by 10X to 100X compared to older technologies. At the same time there is not much thrust given on the interworking with TCP/IP, resulting in poor user experience, as a similar scale of improvement is not seen at application level, once the technologies are deployed in field. The problem related to delayed TCP acknowledgement (ACKs) acts as bottleneck at application level, which in turn results in low uplink (UL) or downlink (DL) Throughput (TP) at the User Equipment (UE). Solutions available in the literature to address the same increase either the processing complexity or wastage of resources, or both. In this paper, two novel solutions are presented to address prioritization of TCP ACKs by Sequence Number (SN) reservation and SN space management in simultaneous UL/DL traffic scenarios while maintaining low complexity. Through mathematical modelling and simulation in a standard setup for LTE network, we are able to achieve the effective decrease in downloading time by 5 ~ 25% in comparison to standard schemes. The solution is easy adoptable in NR based 5G network.