Performance evaluation of TCP over HSDPA based on measurements

HSDPA technology has been recently introduced by UMTS mobile operators as a solution both for increasing the downlink throughput and for achieving a more efficient usage of the radio resources. This work analyses the performance of TCP traffic over HSDPA from the user perspective based on experiments and measurements over a real network. The effect of multiple HSDPA users sharing the overall capacity of the cell is explicitly considered. The results show that HSPDA quality of experience is comparable to that achievable on fixed access technologies such as ADSL or Cable networks. In addition, we prove that by adequately tuning TCP parameters, the performance can be significantly improved.