ABSTRACT
Mobile broadband networks play an increasingly important role in society, and there is a strong need for independent assessments of their robustness and performance. A promising source of such information is active end-to-end measurements. It is, however, a challenging task to go from individual measurements to an assessment of network reliability, which is a complex notion encompassing many stability and performance related metrics. This paper presents a framework for measuring the user-experienced reliability in mobile broadband networks. We argue that reliability must be assessed at several levels, from the availability of the network connection to the stability of application performance. Based on the proposed framework, we conduct a large-scale measurement study of reliability in 5 mobile broadband networks. The study builds on active measurements from hundreds of measurement nodes over a period of 10 months. The results show that the reliability of mobile broadband networks is lower than one could hope: more than 20% of connections from stationary nodes are unavailable more than 10 minutes per day. There is, however, a significant potential for improving robustness if a device can connect simultaneously to several networks. We find that in most cases, our devices can achieve 99.999% ("five nines") connection availability by combining two operators. We further show how both radio conditions and network configuration play important roles in determining reliability, and how external measurements can reveal weaknesses and incidents that are not always captured by the operators' existing monitoring tools.
- ITU-T recommendation G.711. Pulse code modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies, 1988.Google Scholar
- Mobiperf. http://www.mobiperf.com, 2014.Google Scholar
- M. Bagnulo, P. Eardley, T. Burbridge, B. Trammell, and R. Winter. Standardizing Large-scale Measurement Platforms. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 43, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco visual networking index: Global mobile data traffic forecast update, 2012--2017, February 2013.Google Scholar
- Communications Regulatory Authority of the Republic of Lithuania. Annual report of the Communications Regulatory Authority (RTT) of the Republic of Lithuania, 2012.Google Scholar
- Digium. Asterisk. http://www.asterisk.org/.Google Scholar
- FCC. 2013 Measuring Broadband America February Report. Technical report, FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, 2013.Google Scholar
- O. Goga and R. Teixeira. Speed Measurements of Residential Internet Access. In Proc. of PAM, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Halepovic, J. Pang, and O. Spatscheck. Can you GET me now?: Estimating the time-to-first-byte of HTTP transactions with passive measurements. In Proc. of IMC, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Holma and A. Toskala. WCDMA for UMTS: HSPA Evolution and LTE. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 4th edition, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Huang, F. Qian, Y. Guo, Y. Zhou, Q. Xu, Z. M. Mao, S. Sen, and O. Spatscheck. An In-depth Study of LTE: Effect of Network Protocol and Application Behavior on Performance. In Proc. of SIGCOMM, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- IEEE. P802.16.3 Project: Mobile Broadband Network Performance Measurements. http://www.ieee802.org/16/mbnpm/index.html.Google Scholar
- H. Jiang, Y. Wang, K. Lee, and I. Rhee. Tackling bufferbloat in 3g/4g networks. In Proc. of IMC, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Z. Koradia, G. Mannava, A. Raman, G. Aggarwal, V. Ribeiro, A. Seth, S. Ardon, A. Mahanti, and S. Triukose. First Impressions on the State of Cellular Data Connectivity in India. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM DEV-4 '13, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Kvalbein, D. Baltrunas, J. Xiang, K. R. Evensen, A. Elmokash, and S. Ferlin-Oliveira. The Nornet Edge platform for mobile broadband measurements. Elsevier Computer Networks special issue on Future Internet Testbeds, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Nikravesh, D. R. Chones, E. Katz-Bassett, Z. M. Mao, and M. Welsh. Mobile Network Performance from User Devices: A Longitudinal, Multidimensional Analysis. In Procs. of PAM, 2014.Google Scholar
- F. Qian, Z. Wang, A. Gerber, Z. M. Mao, S. Sen, and O. Spatscheck. Characterizing Radio Resource Allocation for 3G Networks. In Proc. of IMC, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Sen, J. Yoon, J. Hare, J. Ormont, and S.Banerjee. Can they hear me now?: A case for a client-assisted approach to monitoring wide-area wireless networks. In Proc. of IMC, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Z. Shafiq, L. Ji, A. X. Liu, J. Pang, S. Venkataraman, and J. Wang. A first look at cellular network performance during crowded events. In Proc. of SIGMETRICS, 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Z. Shafiq, L. Ji, A. X. Liu, and J. Wang. Characterizing and Modeling Internet Traffic Dynamics of Cellular Devices. In Proc. of SIGMETRICS, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Sommers and P. Barford. Cell vs. WiFi: On the Performance of Metro Area Mobile Connections. In Proc. of IMC, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Stiemerling. IP Performance Metrics charter-ietf-ippm-05. http: //datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-ippm/, 2013.Google Scholar
- S. Sundaresan, W. de Donato, N. Feamster, R. Teixeira, S. Crawford, and A. Pescapè. Broadband Internet performance: A view from the gateway. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 41:134--145, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Viber-Media. Viber. http://www.viber.com/.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Measuring the Reliability of Mobile Broadband Networks
Recommendations
Reliability and Survivability Analysis for UMTS Networks: An Analytical Approach
Reliability and survivability are the two important attributes of cellular networks. In the existing literature, these measures were studied through the simulation. In this paper, we construct an analytical model to determine reliability and ...
Measuring network reliability and repairability against cascading failures
Cascading failures on techno-socio-economic systems can have dramatic and catastrophic implications in society. A damage caused by a cascading failure, such as a power blackout, is complex to predict, understand, prevent and mitigate as such complex ...
Analysis of mobile broadband competition: 3G vs. WiFi
This paper analyses optimal pricing of two different platforms of broadband mobile internet access where one provider uses third generation (3G) and the other WiFi. The authors utilised a game theoretic competition model considering population density, ...
Comments