OPTIMISATION OF WEB BROWSING OVER UMTS AND COMPARISON WITH ADSL

Service optimization is of extreme importance to mobile operators like Orange for providing better user experience to customers. Web browsing is believed to be one of the services that will be more popular for Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) customers. For web browsing, page and object response times are considered to be very important factors. This study focuses on improving the web browsing performance over UMTS networks by adjusting radio parameters to be able to provide similar level of performance as can be obtained over Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL). Performance was reflected by page and object response times and system capacity. Simulations were used as the method to obtain experimental data. A shortlist of parameters was made based on the functionality of parameters. Finally, three parameters having the most effect on performance were chosen based on mathematical analysis of results. These were adjusted based on their effect to improve performance. Due to numerous degrees of freedom encountered in the project it was difficult to draw any firm conclusions. However, it was shown that there is a scope for improving the performance of UMTS networks for web browsing by adjustment of radio parameters. A set of values of selected Radio Resource Management (RRM) parameters is suggested based on analysis of experimental data. The limitations encountered in the project are discussed and proposals are given on how to circumvent them. Also, based on the characteristics of web traffic, a modification to HTTP/1.1 protocol and web server architecture is proposed to exploit the behaviour of UMTS radio networks which would provide better performance by using the common channels for transmission of data.Orange PCS Lt