Effects on TCP from Radio-Block Scheduling in WCDMA High Speed Downlink Shared Channels

Avoiding delay jitter is essential to achieve high throughput for TCP. In particular, delay spikes can cause spurious timeouts. Such timeouts force TCP into slow-start, which may reduce congestion window sizes drastically. Consequently, there may not always be data available for transmission on bottleneck links. For HS-DSCH, jitter can occur due to varying interference. Also, properties of the radio-block scheduling influence the jitter. We evaluate, through simulations, effects on TCP from scheduling. Our evaluation shows that round-robin (RR) schedulers can give more jitter than SIR schedulers. SIR schedulers discriminates low SIR users to improve spectrum utilization while RR schedulers distribute transmission capacity fairly. The high jitter with RR scheduling cause however both lower utilization and decreased fairness in throughput among users than with SIR scheduling. The Eifel algorithm makes TCP more robust against delay spikes and reduces thereby these problems.