A TCP Enhancement Method Based on LTE Carrier Aggregation Usage Identification

Carrier aggregation (CA) techniques in LTE-Advanced expand wireless data rates by using multiple component carriers (CCs) simultaneously. However, transport layer protocols such as TCP cannot utilize the full performance of CA because they control sending rates independently regardless of wireless capacities. In this paper we propose a TCP control method based on the identification result of CA usage. We found that the occurrence frequency of delay spikes correlated with the number of CCs through substantiative experiments. We then developed a CA identification method that uses the delay spikes' occurrence frequency. We proposed an adaptive TCP rate control method in accordance with estimated wireless bandwidth based on CA identification results. We verified that our method identified CA usage at 72% accuracy within one second, and increased average throughput by 15% for CA.

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