Mobility Management for TCP in mmWave Networks

Communication at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies will likely be a cornerstone for next generation 5G cellular networks. However, providing mobility support for end-to-end applications in mmWave cellular systems is challenging due to the relatively small coverage area of individual cells, and rapid channel dynamics caused by blockage and beam-tracking. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of TCP on top of mmWave cellular systems with mobility management, detailed modeling of the channel dynamics, and end-to-end network architectures. We show how an efficient mobility management scheme in a dense network deployment can dramatically improve the performance of TCP in terms of both throughput and latency in mobile scenarios with blocking. The study also reveals that, even with fast mobility management, TCP throughput is extremely sensitive to the end-to-end delay with implications on both core network and server location.