Simulation analysis of RLC timers in UMTS systems

Radio Link Control (RLC) is the layer two protocol used in 3G UMTS cellular systems for flow control and error recovery. Due to the complexity of the protocol and the multitude of parameter configurations available, it is extremely difficult to model RLC analytically. Therefore we present a simulation model to study RLC performance in UMTS systems. We focus on the impacts of the poll prohibit timer and the poll timer on RLC throughput, goodput and delay. Our simulation results provide some insight into the optimization of these two timer values.