Analysis of UMTS Radio Link Control

UMTS Radio Link Control (RLC) contains a suite of features and options that make it a challenging task for performance evaluation. In this paper, we develop a periodic-polling-based retransmission model to analyze the RLC protocol. We derive the evolution of the queue length distribution that can be used to construct a Markov chain. While the task of obtaining a closed-form solution for this Markov Chain given a general set of system parameters seems to be formidable, we have been able to obtain a closed-form solution for the average system occupancy for some interesting special cases. To validate the efficacy of the analytical model, we perform numerical calculation on the upper and lower bounds of the average packet delay and compare it with the simulation results. The results show that the lower bound derived is very tight.