Characterization by Measurement

of a CDMA 1x EVDO Network

Mark Claypool, Robert Kinicki, William Lee, Mingzhe Li, and

Gregory Ratner

CS Department at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, MA 01609
USA

Presenter: Mingzhe Li [lmz@cs.wpi.edu]

Wireless Internet Conference (WICON’06)
Boston, Massachusetts, August 2006
 Motivation
• EVDO 3G cellular data networks
– Provides more bandwidth
– More applications:
• Throughput sensitive
• Latency sensitive
• Multimedia streaming
• Current research of cellular data network
performance
– Theoretical analysis and simulations
– Measurements studies
• 2G/2.5G networks
• Focus on throughput
• Few latency measurements and bandwidth estimations
• We need more characterization on EVDO networks.
2

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Introduction
• Measurement based characterization
of EVDO network
– TCP throughput
– Round trip time
– Loss rate
– Bandwidth estimation
• Gauge the ability of EVDO to support
the QoS of a range of applications
3

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Outline
• Introduction
• Methodology
– Testbed
– Tools
– Experiment Design
• Analysis
• Conclusion and future work
4

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Testbed

50 Mbps uplink

Measure downlink
network to the laptop

Sierra Wireless Aircard 580 PCMCIA

EVDO Network Card
Gnu Linux kernel 2.6.11
5

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Tools
Measurements Tools
TCP Throughput Gnu Wget.
RTT and loss rate Standard Linux ping.
npath Loosely based on pathrate
Bandwidth estimation using packet pair/train

L
 out  max( in , )
Bi
L L
R  
min i 0,..., H Bi B
L
B
R
6

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Experimen design
• Each test includes:
– Measure wireless signal strength
– Wget downloads 20 Mbyte file
– Ping server 100 times
– npath: capacity estimation
• Packet pairs length: 25 packets
• Packet size: 1472, 1200, 1000, and 800 bytes
• Repeat 30 times for each packet size
– Each test takes 12 minutes in total
• Run every 30 minutes for a week
– November 28, 2005 to December 4, 2005 7

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Outline
• Introduction
• Methodology
– Testbed
– Tools
– Experimental Desgin
• Analysis
• Conclusion and future work
8

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Analysis
• Data collected
– 48 runs each day for 7 days
– All tests with excellent signal strength
• -90 to -83 dBm
– TCP throughput: tcpdump and tcptrace
– RTT and packet loss: ping
– Network capacity: npath.
• Analysis focus
– Week day: Wednesday November 30, 2005
– Weekend: Saturday December 3, 2005 9

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 TCP Throughput (cont.)

 TCP throughput lower than theoretically EVDO networks

 No visual correlation between throughput and the time of day
 Satisfactory for most Internet applications 10

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 TCP Throughput

 TCP throughput are consistent between tests

 Slightly higher TCP throughput for weekend 11

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Round trip time of a weekday

 Average RTT are consistent between tests

 Maximum RTT vary greatly.
 No visual correlation between RTT and the time of day. 12

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 CCDF of RTT

 Median RTT 200ms is too high for interactive applications.

 Maximum RTT around 1 second can seriously Impact the 13
performance of interactive applications.

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Bandwidth Estimation
Tests
of a weekday

 Median of estimated bandwidth is consistent

 5th percentile of estimated bandwidth varies. 14

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 Bandwidth Estimation (cont.)
Tests for weekday
and weekend
at 5:30pm

 Bandwidth estimations are consistent.

 Only a small percentage of packet pairs get low estimatiions 15

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Summary and Conclusion

• 3G EVDO network provides higher throughput than 2G/2.5G cellular

networks
• The high RTT may impact the performance of interactive applications
• Bandwidth estimations are consistent, suggesting packet pairs are
sufficient for bandwidth estimation.
• Neither throughput, round-trip time, nor bandwidth estimation correlates
with time of day or the day of the week. 16

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Future work
• More Characterizations
– Mobility
– Poor signal quality
– Variable traffic load
– Comparison with other cellar networks
• Application performance
– Interactive applications (games, VoIP)
– Multimedia streaming applications
17

WICON’06 – Boston, Massachusetts

 Characterization by Measurement
of a CDMA 1x EVDO Network

Mark Claypool, Robert Kinicki, William Lee, Mingzhe Li, and

Gregory Ratner

CS Department at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, MA 01609
USA

Presenter: Mingzhe Li [lmz@cs.wpi.edu]

Wireless Internet Conference (WICON’06)
Boston, Massachusetts, August 2006