Toward The Concurrent Transportation Protocol for High Traffic Volume in 4G/5G Networks

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was intentionally designed for the sake of service reliability but with the cost of application performance on which TCP clients need to use multiple connections to achieve concurrency and to reduce latency. And more importantly, it was design mostly for the fixed networks and to transport traffic of non-real-time applications and thus not suitable for the mobile networks with higher packet error rate and real-time traffic. For example, TCP is a connection-oriented protocol, so it has to guarantee delivery of information, in order to maintain that connection. The recipient has to acknowledge the data that was sent and that creates overhead. It means that it's going to take more packets transferred, and thus higher delay. To address this weakness of TCP, and on this paper, we proposed a new application-level protocol that makes use of TCP as transportation, named as CoTCP (Concurrent request-response over TCP). The new proposed protocol allows sending and receiving multiple messages concurrently on one connection. We also evaluated and tested the performance of CoTCP in various application scenarios on the specific hardware platform. Numerical results show that CoTCP can lead to higher concurrency and lower latency.