An End-to-End Measurement Study of Modern Cellular Data Networks

With the significant increase in cellular data usage, it is critical to better understand the characteristics and behavior of cellular data networks. With both laboratory experiments and crowd-sourcing measurements, we investigated the characteristics of the cellular data networks for the three mobile ISPs in Singapore. We found that i) the transmitted packets tend to arrive in bursts; ii) there can be large variations in the instantaneous throughput over a short period of time; iii) large separate downlink buffers are typically deployed, which can cause high latency when the throughput is low; and iv) the networks typically implement some form of fair queuing policy.