Handovers with forward admission control for adaptive TCP streaming in LTE-advanced with small cells

An important trend in the evolution of cellular networks is the introduction of cost efficient small cells. However, most of these cells will have only wireless connectivity to the backbone. Consequently, handovers will be needed much more frequently and the bandwidth between neighboring cells will become a scarce resource. Both problems are likely to affect one of the most fast growing cellular applications: adaptive TCP video streaming. While the high handover rate is likely to have a negative impact on TCP streaming due to packet loss during handovers, solutions that forward packets from the old cell to the new one must limit the amount of wireless bandwidth they use. This trade-off is addressed in the following paper. © 2012 IEEE.