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An in-depth study of LTE: effect of network protocol and application behavior on performance

Authors:

Subhabrata Sen,

Oliver SpatscheckAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

Pages 363 - 374

https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486006

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

With lower latency and higher bandwidth than its predecessor 3G networks, the latest cellular technology 4G LTE has been attracting many new users. However, the interactions among applications, network transport protocol, and the radio layer still remain unexplored. In this work, we conduct an in-depth study of these interactions and their impact on performance, using a combination of active and passive measurements. We observed that LTE has significantly shorter state promotion delays and lower RTTs than those of 3G networks. We discovered various inefficiencies in TCP over LTE such as undesired slow start. We further developed a novel and lightweight passive bandwidth estimation technique for LTE networks. Using this tool, we discovered that many TCP connections significantly under-utilize the available bandwidth. On average, the actually used bandwidth is less than 50% of the available bandwidth. This causes data downloads to be longer, and incur additional energy overhead. We found that the under-utilization can be caused by both application behavior and TCP parameter setting. We found that 52.6% of all downlink TCP flows have been throttled by limited TCP receive window, and that data transfer patterns for some popular applications are both energy and network unfriendly. All these findings highlight the need to develop transport protocol mechanisms and applications that are more LTE-friendly.

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An in-depth study of LTE: effect of network protocol and application behavior on performance

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

580 pages

ISBN:9781450320566

DOI:10.1145/2486001

General Chairs:
Dah Ming Chiu
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Jia Wang
AT&T Labs - Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2013

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SIGCOMM'13

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SIGCOMM

SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference

August 12 - 16, 2013

Hong Kong, China

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SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3327345
Kim JIm YLee K(2024)Enabling Delay-Guaranteed Congestion Control With One-Bit Feedback in Cellular NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.326872132:1(3-16)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3268721
Lim HLee JLee JSathyanarayana SKim JNguyen AKim KIm YChiang MGrunwald DLee KHa S(2024)An Empirical Study of 5G: Effect of Edge on Transport Protocol and Application PerformanceIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.327470823:4(3172-3186)Online publication date: May-2024
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Cai DWu YWang SLin FXu MCosta XAl Hassanieh HAsadi ACox LPerino DWidmer JGiustiniano D(2023)Efficient Federated Learning for Modern NLPProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3592505(1-16)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
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Fida MOcampo AElmokashfi A(2022)Measuring and Localising Congestion in Mobile Broadband NetworksIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.311572219:1(366-380)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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