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M. Laner, J. Fabini, P. Svoboda, M. Rupp:
"End-to-end Delay in Mobile Networks: Does the Traffic Pattern Matter?";
Talk: ISWCS'13, Ilmenau, Germany; 08-26-2013 - 08-30-2013; in: "Proceedings of ISWCS'13", (2013), 5 pages.

Modern mobile communication networks react intelligently
on user traffic in order to efficiently manage the
scarce link bandwidth; for example, by offering high demand
users high speed links.Reactiveness bears a central implication
for active measurements, namely, the injected probing traffic
defines the experienced network performance or, conversely, the
obtained measurement results reflect the probing pattern. High
precision end-to-end latency measurements therefore require the
specification of the traffic pattern for reproducibility. This leads
to a basic question: How accurate do these traffic patterns need
to be modeled, in order to enable reproducible measurement
results?
To answer it, we perform active latency measurements in a
public 3G HSPA network by employing various traffic patterns.
We find that both packet size and packet inter-arrival time
strongly affect the latency. Further, the respective history appears
to have an influence and, finally, also correlations between both
variables change the delay response of the network. This study
motivates the deployment of highly sophisticated traffic models
in the context of latency measurements, since any generalization
of measurement results to arbitrary traffic patterns is shown to
be questionable.

packet delay, data traffic pattern