Experimental Analysis of TCP and UDP during LTE Handover

Mobile IP services, including web browsing, VoIP (Voice over IP), video streaming and so on, are demanding more and more bandwidth with higher communication quality. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is one of the solutions to provide higher data throughput and lower latency. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the performance of TCP and UDP during LTE handover. The mobile users experience performance degradation due to the interference between source and target eNBs (evolved NodeB). Also the interruption during handover may affect delay sensitive service such as VoIP. We measured the TCP throughput and the delay of UDP during the handover process on our indoor and outdoor LTE testbeds. The results show that better TCP throughput performance is obtained by decreasing the A3 offset value. This also improves the delay performance during a handover.