Joint uplink and downlink admission control to both streaming and elastic flows in CDMA/HSDPA systems

TCP-based data flows generate packets and ACKs in two directions, be it in the wireline or wireless networks. In the latter case, packets are typically found in the downlink whereas ACKs are in the uplink. These two links are asymmetric in the case of CDMA-based High Data Rate (HDR) and High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) systems, the uplink being much slower than the downlink and thus, in some cases, restrictive in terms of the achievable throughput of the TCP flow. The aim of this work is to evaluate the performance of such a setting, in the presence of both streaming and elastic traffic, under a dynamic scenario where users arrive at the system and leave it after completion of their service. We specifically quantify the impact of the uplink on the overall performance of TCP and study the model variations as functions of several parameters such as load, file size and radio conditions.