Performance evaluation of TCP, UDP and DCCP for video traffics over 4G network

Fourth Generation (4G) system has been used more widely than the older generations 3G and 2G. Among the reasons are that the 4G’s transfer rate is higher and it supports all multimedia functions. Besides, its’ supports for wide geographical locus makes wireless technology gets more advanced. The essential goal of 4G is to enable voice-based communication being implemented endlessly. To achieve the goal, this study tries to answer the following research questions: (1), are the old protocols suit with this new technology; (2), which one has the best performance and, (3) which one has the greatest effect on throughput, delay, packet delivery ratio and packet loss. The aforementioned questions are crucial in the performance evaluation of the most famous protocols (particularly User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)) within the 4G environment. Through the Network Simulator-3 (NS-3), the performance of transporting MPEG-4 video stream including throughput, delay, packet loss, and packet delivery ratio are analyzed at the base station through UDP, TCP, and DCCP protocols over 4G’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. The results show that DCCP has better throughput, and lesser delay, but at the same time it has more packet loss than UDP and TCP. Based on the results, DCCP is recommended as a transport protocol for real time video