I have been doing packet captures (tcpdump) of high speed LTE downloads. I have noticed that the rate at the beginning of the trace, even after taking into account the slow start behavior of TCP, is significantly lower than the rate later on.
I have tried to find an explanation for this behavior and I was told that some commercial schedulers are rate limited and that this limitation is lifted after a certain number of packets has been transmitted in a flow. I have also red that unused sub-carriers are switched off in order to save energy and reduce interference to other cells.
On the other hand I was not able to find a description of such behavior in the documentation or in any research paper.
Can anyone verify this behavior?
