Abstract—Mobile applications such as VoIP, (live) gaming, or
video streaming have diverse QoS requirements ranging from low
delay to high throughput. The optimization of the network quality
experienced by end-users requires detailed knowledge of the
expected network performance. Also, the achieved service quality
is affected by a number of factors, including network operator
and available technologies. However, most studies measuring
the cellular network do not consider the performance implications
of network configuration and management. To this end, this
paper reports about an extensive data set of cellular network
measurements, focused on analyzing root causes of mobile network
performance variability. Measurements conducted on a 4G
cellular network in Germany show that management and configuration
decisions have a substantial impact on the performance.
Specifically, it is observed that the association of mobile devices
to a point of presence (PoP) within the operator’s network can
influence the end-to-end performance by a large extent. Given
the collected data, a model predicting the PoP assignment and
its resulting RTT leveraging Markov chain and machine learning
approaches is developed. RTT increases of 58% to 73% compared
to the optimum performance are observed in more than 57% of
the measurements. Measurements of the response and page load
times of popular websites lead to similar results, namely, a median
increase of 40% between the worst and the best performing PoP.
Index Terms—Cellular networks, Performance analysis, 4G
mobile communication, Network measurement.