Characterizing radio resource allocation for 3G networks

3G cellular data networks have recently witnessed explosive growth. In this work, we focus on UMTS, one of the most popular 3G mobile communication technologies. Our work is the first to accurately infer, for any UMTS network, the state machine (both transitions and timer values) that guides the radio resource allocation policy through a light-weight probing scheme. We systematically characterize the impact of operational state machine settings by analyzing traces collected from a commercial UMTS network, and pinpoint the inefficiencies caused by the interplay between smartphone applications and the state machine behavior. Besides basic characterizations, we explore the optimal state machine settings in terms of several critical timer values evaluated using real network traces. Our findings suggest that the fundamental limitation of the current state machine design is its static nature of treating all traffic according to the same inactivity timers, making it difficult to balance trad...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Feng Qian, Zhaoguang Wang, Alexandre Gerber, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Subhabrata Sen, Oliver Spatscheck
• Keywords: IMC 2010, Internet Technology, Radio Resource, State Machine, State Machine Settings