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V. Raida, P. Svoboda, M. Kruschke, M. Rupp:
"Constant Rate Ultra Short Probing (CRUSP): Measurements in Live LTE Networks";
Talk: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2019), Shanghai, China; 05-20-2019 - 05-24-2019; in: "IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2019)", IEEE (ed.); (2019), 6 pages.

Throughput is one of the most important key performance indicators in cellular mobile networks. In wired networks, there are applications that estimate available throughput based on various low-volume traffic patterns. In wireless networks, however, these techniques have not proven itself to work.

Common throughput measurement tools estimate the available throughput by downloading as much data as possible for a predefined time. If the signal-to-noise ratio is high and the cell load is low, then such approach becomes expensive in terms of the consumed data volume, which users usually have to pay for.

In our previous work, we proposed constant rate ultra short probing (CRUSP); in the controlled LTE test cell, we confirmed that CRUSP can estimate available throughput while consuming less than 2 MB. In this paper, we report on several drive tests (vehicular measurements) and analyze the performance of three Austrian operators in order to verify whether CRUSP can also be successfully applied to real live LTE networks.

Due to the highly dynamic nature of the mobile networks, we lack the ground truth when measuring throughput in live cells. To tackle this problem, we scheduled the same number of longer iPerf3 measurements, and then compared the throughput distributions of both tools using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

We find that CRUSP yields the same distribution as iPerf3 if there is no UDP throttling in force. With UDP throttling, CRUSP does not match iPerf3 perfectly, but its distribution is still close. Hence, we can use CRUSP for operator benchmarking. In most cases, CRUSP saves more than 90% of measurement time and more than 90\% of data volume.

cellular mobile networks, LTE, measurements, throughput, constant rate ultra short probing, mobile network operators, benchmarking, drive tests, iPerf

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_279695.pdf