Packet Probing Study to Assess Sustainability in Available Bandwidth Measurements: Case of High-Speed Cellular Networks

Al-Hussein Hameed Jasim¹, Niclas Ögren², Dimitar Minovski^1,2, and Karl Andersson¹⁺

¹Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering,
Luleå University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skellefteå, Sweden
jasalh-7@student.ltu.se, {dimitar.minovski, karl.andersson}@ltu.se

²InfoVista Sweden AB, SE-931 62, Skellefteå, Sweden

{niclas.ogren, dimitar.minovski}@infovista.com

Abstract

Facts and figures indicate that the latest generations of cellular networks are likely to become the dominant medium of the global data exchange. This may pose a challenge to service providers trying to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) provided that is usually specified in Service Level Agreement (SLA), which, in turn, has to be practically verified. It requires methods and tools to measure the adopted QoS metrics such as bandwidth and Round-Trip Time (RTT). For this research, the InfoVista’s proprietary tool (Blixt^TM) was used. The research discusses how the probing packet parameters play a vital role in determining the accuracy of the measurements, the level of intrusiveness in a shared-resources network, and its implications for sustainability for this application. The experiments were carried out in a live commercial network and the performance was also compared with other cutting-edge available bandwidth measurement tools in a multi-carrier scenario.

Keywords: network performance, active measurement, available bandwidth, 4G/LTE

+: Corresponding author: Karl Andersson
Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skellefteå, Sweden, Tel: +46 (0)910 585364

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA), Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 106-125, June 2020 [pdf]

Received: April 3, 2020; Accepted: June 5, 2020; Published: June 30, 2020

DOI:10.22667/JOWUA.2020.06.30.106