A Comparison Between One-way Delays in Operating HSPA and LTE Networks

Markus Laner, Philipp Svoboda, Peter Romirer-Maierhofer, Navid Nikaein, Fabio Ricciato and Markus Rupp
Vienna University of Technology, Austria FTW, Austria EURECOM, France

WINMEE12, May 18, 2012, Paderborn, Germany

Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

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Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

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Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Motivation
Latency aects user experience Increasing importance/attention What to improve? Measurements

Video

?
Low Latency

Future Appl.

Alarm

Gaming

Voice

M2M

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Contributions
Measurements of LTE and HSPA latency Verication of LTE design goals (popular estimates) Comparing inuences of
Packet size Data rate
latency estimates [Holma, 2010]
RTT (ms) 30 Core RNC NodeB 20 TTI Buffering Scheduling Retransm. eNodeB TTI Buffering Scheduling Retransm. UE 0 HSPA LTE UE

QoS estimates for latency sensitive applications

HSPA LTE RTT QoS

High Speed Packet Access Long Term Evolution Round Trip Time Quality of Service

10

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Denition of Latency
Latency [3GPP, TS 25.913]:
Control-plane: Transition time from idle to connected state User-plane: Packet (0 Bytes) available at IP layer of UE/GW

Ambiguities:
Size: IP datagrams vs. IP fragments Availability: Start vs. end Intermediate interfaces: No IP

Def.: Last bit of an IP datagram passing each interface Q: Is this def. enough for low data rate applications?
Interface 1 Interface 2 Interface 3 1,2 1,3
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IP datagram, 4 fragments time

2,3

Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Setup
3G and 4G networks (3GPP Rel. 8) Modem: Huawei E392, triple-mode FDD: 10 MHz (HSPA) vs. 20 MHz (LTE) Radio: Line-of-sight, 130 m

Probe

Probe

Server

Server

NodeB USB RNC Modem PC Client

Gn

Gi

HSPA

GGSN Internet SGi

Server

S1U Probe

LTE
eNodeB SAE GW Probe ran owd cn Probe

PC Server

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Measurement Devices
Passive packet sning (wiretaps) - ve Probes GPS synchronized Protocol parsing Packet identication timestamp comparison

Probe

Probe

Server

Server

NodeB USB RNC Modem PC Client

Gn

Gi

HSPA

GGSN Internet SGi

Server

S1U Probe

LTE
eNodeB SAE GW Probe ran owd cn Probe

PC Server

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Trac Generation
Data-trac inuences latency Independent uplink and downlink Random packet size and inter-arrival time [IETF, RFC 2330][Fabini, 2009][Baccelli, 2007] Blocked measurements xed data-rate

HSPA modem

Internet

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

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Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Comparison RTT
LTE: 36 ms median RTT HSPA: 42 ms median RTT Minor improvements of 14%
1

RTT

Round Trip Time Cumulative Distribution Function

empirical CDF

CDF

0.5

LTE HSPA 0 0 20 40 60 overall roundtrip time (ms) 80

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

One-way Delay in RAN

Downlink: LTE very fast (7 ms) Uplink: HSPA fast (15 ms) Main reasons for minor performance of LTE: Low layer signaling, scheduling, DRX, and cell conguration (e.g. SR periodicity)
1

RAN

empirical CDF

Radio Access Network Cumulative Distribution Function

0.5

CDF

LTE downlink LTE uplink HSPA downlink HSPA uplink 0 0

M. Laner, TUV

15 30 45 oneway delay RAN (ms)

60
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Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

One-way Delay in Core

Uplink and Downlink equal (1.5 ms) HSPA and LTE similar (1.5 ms) Caution: high load in HSPA tail
1

empirical CDF

0.5

LTE downlink LTE uplink HSPA downlink HSPA uplink 0 0 1 2 3 4 oneway delay CN (ms) 5

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

LTE Delay vs. Packet Size

Scatterplot: No diagonal components no correlation Reason: High bandwidth & LTE scheduling Downlink
5 5

Uplink

datagram size (kByte)

1 3

datagram size (kByte)

4 1 3

0 0

10 20 30 40 overall oneway delay (ms)

50

0 0

10 20 30 40 overall oneway delay (ms)

50

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

LTE Delay vs. Packet Size

Scatterplot: Diagonal components positive correlation Reason: HSPA scheduling & network load Downlink
5 5

Uplink

datagram size (kByte)

1 3

datagram size (kByte)

4 1 3

0 0

10 20 30 40 overall oneway delay (ms)

50

0 0

10 20 30 40 overall oneway delay (ms)

50

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Delay vs. Data-rate

LTE: independent of packet-size HSPA: dependent of packet-size (2 curves) Delay decreasing with increasing rate strong contrast to xed networks (queuing)
60 median overall oneway delay (ms) LTE downlink LTE uplink HSPA downlink HSPA uplink

45

30

15

0 256
M. Laner, TUV

1k

4k 16k 64k data rate (Byte/s)

256k

1M
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Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Latency Sensitive Trac

Online Gaming Data-rate: 1 kByte/s 16 kByte/s Latency: Impairments at RTT > 50 ms M2M (e.g., event-driven, real-time) Data-rate: < 1 kByte/s Latency: Impairments at RTT > 20 ms VoIP, video call Data-rate: 4 kByte/s 256 kByte/s Latency: Impairments at RTT > 200 ms

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Network Type vs. Trac

QoS requirements vs. network performance Not accounting for IP backbone and server processing delays 3G/4G networks not (yet) ready to host certain apps. Source of QoS parameters [LOLA, D3.6, 2012]

Application Online Gaming M2M VoIP

LTE (up/down) ( 31 / 13 ) ms ( 30 / 10 ) ms ( 30 / 15 ) ms

HSPA (up/down) ( 12 / 17 ) ms ( 10 / 16 ) ms ( 35 / 16 ) ms
QoS M2M VoIP Quality of Service Machine to Machine Voice over IP

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Outline
1 Introduction 2 Measurements 3 Results 4 Interpretation 5 Conclusion

M. Laner, TUV

Comparison of Delays in HSPA and LTE

2012-05-18 15/16

Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Conclusions
LTE shows improved latency over HSPA (14%) Decreasing latency with increasing data-rate HSPA uplink scheduling outperforms LTE New low-latency transmission techniques [LOLA project] Semi-persistent scheduling in LTE Latency sensitive apps. require improvements

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Intro.

Measurements

Results

Interpretation

Conclusion

Thank you for your attention!

Markus Laner, Philipp Svoboda, Peter Romirer-Maierhofer, Navid Nikaein, Fabio Ricciato and Markus Rupp
Vienna University of Technology, Austria FTW, Austria EURECOM, France mlaner@tuwien.ac.at www.tc.tuwien.ac.at

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Ref.

References
3GPP. TS 25.913, Requirements for Evolved UTRA and Evolved UTRAN, http://www.3gpp.org/. H. Holma and A. Toskala, WCDMA for UMTS: HSPA Evolution and LTE (5th Edition). Wiley, 2010. M. Laner, P. Svoboda, and M. Rupp, Dissecting 3G Uplink Delay by Measuring in an Operational HSPA Network, in PAM11, Atlanta, Georgia, 2011. J. Fabini, L. Wallentin, and P. Reichl, The importance of being really random: methodological aspects of IP-layer 2G and 3G network delay assessment, in ICC09, Dresden, Germany, 2009. V. Paxson et al. (1998) RFC 2330, Framework for IP Performance Metrics, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2330.txt. F. Baccelli et al., On Optimal Probing for Delay and Loss Measurement, in IMC07, San Diego, California, 2007. libpcap - library for network trac capture, http://www.tcpdump.org/. Darwin Project, http://userver.ftw.at/ricciato/darwin/. Endace DAG, http://www.endace.com/. LinuxPPS, http://wiki.enneenne.com/index.php/LinuxPPS support. EU FP7 LOLA Project, http://www.ict-lola.eu/.
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