research-article

Open access

Dependent Misconfigurations in 5G/4.5G Radio Resource Control

Authors:

Songwu LuAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Networking, Volume 1, Issue CoNEXT1

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/3595288

Published: 05 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we study an important, yet unexplored problem of configuration dependencies in 5G/4.5G radio resource control (RRC). Different from the previous studies in 3G/4G networks, 5G/4.5G allows more than one cells to serve a mobile device, resulting in more configuration dynamics and complexity that vary with all the serving cells. We analyze inter-dependency among configurations, categorize dependent misconfigurations, uncover their root causes, and quantify negative performance impacts. Specifically, we formulate configuration updates into a delta state machine (DSM) and unveil two types of dependent misconfigurations among states (inter-state) and within a state (intra-state); They stem from structural dependency and cross-parameter dependency. We further show that such misconfigurations incur service disruption and performance degradation. Our findings have been largely validated with three US operators and one Chinese operator; Our study has uncovered 644 instances of problematic dependencies.

References

[1]

2023. Artifact Release. https://github.com/mssn/5G_misconfig.

[2]

3GPP. 2022. Carrier Aggregation Explained. https://www.3gpp.org/technologies/101-carrier-aggregation-explained.

[3]

3GPP. 2022. Carrier Aggregation on Mobile Networks. https://www.3gpp.org/technologies/carrier-aggregation-on-mobile-networks.

[4]

3GPP. 2022. TS37.340: NR; Multi-connectivity; Overall description; Stage-2. V16.10.0.

[5]

3GPP. 2022. TS38.215: NR; Physical layer measurements. V16.5.0.

[6]

3GPP. 2023. TS23.501: System Architecture for the 5G System. V16.16.0.

[7]

3GPP. 2023. TS36.101: E-UTRA; User Equipment (UE) Radio Transmission and Reception. V16.16.0.

[8]

3GPP. 2023. TS36.133: E-UTRA; Requirements for support of radio resource management. V16.15.0.

[9]

3GPP. 2023. TS36.304: E-UTRA; User Equipment Procedures in Idle Mode. V16.8.0.

[10]

3GPP. 2023. TS36.331: E-UTRA; Radio Resource Control (RRC). V16.12.0.

[11]

3GPP. 2023. TS38.104: NR; Base Station (BS) radio transmission and reception. V16.15.0.

[12]

3GPP. 2023. TS38.331: NR; Radio Resource Control (RRC). V16.12.0.

[13]

5G America. Jan 2021. 3GPP Releases 16, 17 and Beyond. https://www.5gamericas.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/InDesign-3GPP-Rel-16--17--2021.pdf.

[14]

Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella, and David A Maltz. 2009. Unraveling the Complexity of Network Management. In NSDI.

[15]

Christopher Brunner, Andrea Garavaglia, Mukesh Mittal, Mohit Narang, and Jose Vargas Bautista. 2006. Inter-system Handover Parameter Optimization. In VTC Fall.

[16]

S. A. Busari, R. Mumtaz, and J. Gonzalez. 2020. Multi-Connectivity in 5G New Radio Standards. https://www.standardsuniversity.org/e-magazine/december-2020/multi-connectivity-in-5g-new-radio-standards/.

[17]

Edmund M Clarke, William Klieber, Milo Novácek, and Paolo Zuliani. 2011. Model checking and the state explosion problem. In LASER Summer School on Software Engineering. Springer, 1--30.

[18]

Estefanía Coronado, Shuaib Siddiqui, and Roberto Riggio. 2022. Roadrunner: O-RAN-based Cell Selection in Beyond 5G Networks. In 2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS). 1--7.

Digital Library

[19]

Haotian Deng, Qianru Li, Jingqi Huang, and Chunyi Peng. 2020. iCellSpeed: Increasing Cellular Data Speed with Device-Assisted Cell Selection. In ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'20).

Digital Library

[20]

Haotian Deng, Chunyi Peng, Ans Fida, Jiayi Meng, and Charlie Hu. 2018. Mobility Support in Cellular Networks: A Measurement Study on Its Configurations and Implications. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'18).

Digital Library

[21]

Nick Feamster and Hari Balakrishnan. 2005. Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis. In NSDI. 43--56.

[22]

Timothy G Griffin and Gordon Wilfong. 1999. An analysis of BGP convergence properties. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 29. 277--288.

Digital Library

[23]

Ahmad Hassan, Shuowei Jin, Arvind Narayanan, Ruiyang Zhu, Anlan Zhang, Wei Ye, Jason Carpenter, Z. Morley Mao, Zhi-Li Zhang, and Feng Qian. 2022. Vivisecting Mobility Management in 5G Cellular Networks. In SIGCOMM'22.

Digital Library

[24]

Dilip A Joseph, Arsalan Tavakoli, and Ion Stoica. 2008. A policy-aware switching layer for data centers. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 38. ACM, 51--62.

Digital Library

[25]

Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, Ryan Beckett, Behnaz Arzani, Todd Millstein, and George Varghese. 2020. GRoot: Proactive Verification of DNS Configurations (SIGCOMM'20). 310--328.

[26]

Ali T Koc, Satish C Jha, Rath Vannithamby, and Murat Torlak. 2014. Device power saving and latency optimization in LTE-A networks through DRX configuration. IEEE Transactions on wireless communications 13, 5 (2014), 2614--2625.

[27]

Craig Labovitz, Abha Ahuja, Abhijit Bose, and Farnam Jahanian. 2000. Delayed Internet routing convergence. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 30, 4 (2000), 175--187.

Digital Library

[28]

Qianru Li and Chunyi Peng. 2021. Reconfiguring Cell Selection in 4G/5G Networks. In IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'21).

[29]

Qianru Li, Zhehui Zhang, Yanbing Liu, Zhaowei Tan, Chunyi Peng, and Songwu Lu. 2023. CA: Enhancing Carrier Aggregation Beyond 5G (MobiCom'23).

[30]

Yuanjie Li, Haotian Deng, Jiayao Li, Chunyi Peng, and Songwu Lu. 2016. Instability in Distributed Mobility Management: Revisiting Configuration Management in 3G/4G Mobile Networks. In ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Science (SIGMETRICS'16).

Digital Library

[31]

Min Liu, Zhongcheng Li, Xiaobing Guo, and Eryk Dutkiewicz. 2008. Performance analysis and optimization of handoff algorithms in heterogeneous wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 7, 7 (2008), 846--857.

Digital Library

[32]

Yanbing Liu and Chunyi Peng. 2023. A Close Look at 5G in the Wild: Unrealized Potentials and Implications. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'23).

[33]

Andreas Lobinger, Szymon Stefanski, Thomas Jansen, and Irina Balan. 2011. Coordinating handover parameter optimization and load balancing in LTE self-optimizing networks. In 2011 IEEE 73rd vehicular technology conference (VTC Spring). 1--5.

[34]

Ratul Mahajan, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson. 2002. Understanding BGP misconfiguration. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 32, 4 (2002), 3--16.

Digital Library

[35]

Ajay Mahimkar, Zihui Ge, Xuan Liu, Yusef Shaqalle, Yu Xiang, Jennifer Yates, Shomik Pathak, and Rick Reichel. 2022. Aurora: conformity-based configuration recommendation to improve LTE/5G service. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference. 83--97.

Digital Library

[36]

MobileInsight. 2022. http://www.mobileinsight.net.

[37]

Arvind Narayanan, Eman Ramadan, Jason Carpenter, Qingxu Liu, Yu Liu, Feng Qian, and Zhi-Li Zhang. 2020. A First Look at Commercial 5G Performance on Smartphones (WWW'20).

[38]

Arvind Narayanan, Xumiao Zhang, Ruiyang Zhu, Ahmad Hassan, Shuowei Jin, Xiao Zhu, Xiaoxuan Zhang, Denis Rybkin, Zhengxuan Yang, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Qian Qian, and Zhi-Li Zhang. 2021. A variegated look at 5G in the wild: performance, power, and QoE implications (SIGCOMM'21). 610--625.

[39]

Heng Pan, Zhenyu Li, Penghao Zhang, Kave Salamatian, and Gaogang Xie. 2020. Misconfiguration checking for SDN: data structure, theory and algorithms. In IEEE 28th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'20).

[40]

Vasileios Pappas, Zhiguo Xu, Songwu Lu, Daniel Massey, Andreas Terzis, and Lixia Zhang. 2004. Impact of configuration errors on DNS robustness. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 34. 319--330.

Digital Library

[41]

Chunyi Peng and Yuanjie Li. 2016. Demystify Undesired Handoff in Cellular Networks. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA) (ICCCN'16). 9 pages.

[42]

Chunyi Peng, Yuanjie Li, Zhuoran Li, Jie Zhao, and Jiaqi Xu. 2016. Understanding and Diagnosing Real-World Femtocell Performance Problems. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

[43]

Peng Sun, Ratul Mahajan, Jennifer Rexford, Lihua Yuan, Ming Zhang, and Ahsan Arefin. 2014. A Network-State Management Service. In SIGCOMM'14.

Digital Library

[44]

Dongzhu Xu, Anfu Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Guixian Wang, Xi Liu, Congkai An, Yiming Shi, Liang Liu, and Huadong Ma. 2020. Understanding Operational 5G: A First Measurement Study on Its Coverage, Performance and Energy Consumption (SIGCOMM'20).

[45]

Shichang Xu, Ashkan Nikravesh, and Z Morley Mao. 2019. Leveraging Context-Triggered Measurements to Characterize LTE Handover Performance. In PAM.

[46]

Zengwen Yuan, Qianru Li, Yuanjie Li, Songwu Lu, Chunyi Peng, and George Varghese. 2018. Resolving Policy Conflicts in Multi-Carrier Cellular Access. In ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'18).

[47]

Xiaohui Zhao, Hanyang Ma, Yuan Jin, and Jianguo Yao. 2018. Measuring instability of mobility management in cellular networks. IEEE Network 32, 5 (2018), 138--144.

[48]

ZTE. 2013. UMTS Handover Description. http://www.slideshare.net/quyetnguyenhong/zte-umtshandoverdescription. Accessed on Oct 16, 2021.

Cited By

Gao SLi YShen YShao YChen L(2024)ETC: Efficient Training of Temporal Graph Neural Networks over Large-Scale Dynamic GraphsProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3641204.364121517:5(1060-1072)Online publication date: 2-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3641204.3641215
Mai GHe ZYu GChen ZChen P(2024)CTuner: Automatic NoSQL Database Tuning with Causal Reinforcement LearningProceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3671016.3674809(269-278)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3671016.3674809
Gao SLi YZhang XShen YShao YChen L(2024)SIMPLE: Efficient Temporal Graph Neural Network Training at Scale with Dynamic Data PlacementProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549772:3(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654977
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Dependent Misconfigurations in 5G/4.5G Radio Resource Control
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
    1. Availability
2. Networks
  1. Network algorithms
    1. Control path algorithms
      1. Network resources allocation
  2. Network types
    1. Mobile networks

Recommendations

Understanding and discovering software configuration dependencies in cloud and datacenter systems
ESEC/FSE 2020: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

A large percentage of real-world software configuration issues, such as misconfigurations, involve multiple interdependent configuration parameters. However, existing techniques and tools either do not consider dependencies among configuration ...
Security Misconfigurations in Open Source Kubernetes Manifests: An Empirical Study
Context: Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto tool for automated container orchestration. Business and government organizations are increasingly adopting Kubernetes for automated software deployments. Kubernetes is being used to provision applications ...
EnCore: exploiting system environment and correlation information for misconfiguration detection
ASPLOS '14

As software systems become more complex and configurable, failures due to misconfigurations are becoming a critical problem. Such failures often have serious functionality, security and financial consequences. Further, diagnosis and remediation for such ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Networking

Proceedings of the ACM on Networking Volume 1, Issue CoNEXT1

PACMNET

June 2023

66 pages

EISSN:2834-5509

DOI:10.1145/3607151

Editor:
Marco Mellia
Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 July 2023

Published in PACMNET Volume 1, Issue CoNEXT1

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
492
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)468
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)39

Reflects downloads up to 18 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gao SLi YShen YShao YChen L(2024)ETC: Efficient Training of Temporal Graph Neural Networks over Large-Scale Dynamic GraphsProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3641204.364121517:5(1060-1072)Online publication date: 2-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3641204.3641215
Mai GHe ZYu GChen ZChen P(2024)CTuner: Automatic NoSQL Database Tuning with Causal Reinforcement LearningProceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3671016.3674809(269-278)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3671016.3674809
Gao SLi YZhang XShen YShao YChen L(2024)SIMPLE: Efficient Temporal Graph Neural Network Training at Scale with Dynamic Data PlacementProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549772:3(1-25)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654977
Liu YGuo JPeng CXu CDavies N(2024)Demystifying Secondary Radio Access Failures in 5GProceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3638550.3641125(114-120)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638550.3641125
Wang YSachurengui SZhang DAziguli Wulamu Bao H(2023)A Factor Marginal Effect Analysis Approach and Its Application in E-Commerce Search SystemInternational Journal of Intelligent Systems10.1155/2023/69688542023Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2023/6968854
Zhu SXu QZeng JWang SSun YYang ZYang CPeng Z(2023)F3KM: Federated, Fair, and Fast k-meansProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36267281:4(1-25)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626728
Moro EPolese MCapone AMelodia T(2023)An Open RAN Framework for the Dynamic Control of 5G Service Level Agreements2023 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN59219.2023.10329597(141-146)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/NFV-SDN59219.2023.10329597

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents