The analysis is based on the results of a crowd sourced measurement campaign, and an extensive stationary network measurement study.
The findings in this paper differ from related studies in that the analysis performed also includes data paths taken through the network to derive their influence on end-to-end perfor- mance. RTT increases of more than 58% compared to the best performing point of presence (PoP) have been observed for stationary devices. These show a periodicity of 36 hours. Combining these observations with traces through the network leads to the conclusion that network configuration and man- agement are the main factors affecting the cellular network performance in the measured network. These results are con- firmed for general mobile network access by assessing the response times of the 25 most popular websites in Germany.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, similar studies and related publications are sum- marized. Section III explains the measurement methodology applied and summarizes the data sets in Section IV, which are used in the analysis in Section V. Section VI analyses the real- world influence of the PoP selection on the mobile network’s end-to-end performance. Based on network measurements and time, a prediction model for the network performance is pro- posed in Section VII. Finally, Section VIII concludes the paper and gives an outlook into further research directions.
This publication differs from [7] in that the effects of the network operator’s PoP selection on realistic traffic patterns are assessed. Therefore, the related work is extended by stud- ies related to CDNs and their placement. Further, references showing similar effects to the ones observed in this work are added. For the analysis of the user perceived network quality, additional measurements were conducted. The setup is described in Section III, while the measurements are dis- cussed in Section IV. Section VI analyzes the measurements and derives the implications on the mobile service quality. The results are discussed and compared to the previous measure- ments in Section VIII.