Volume 11 - Issue 2
Packet Probing Study to Assess Sustainability in Available Bandwidth Measurements: Case of High-Speed Cellular Networks
- Al-Hussein Hameed Jasim
Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Lulea University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skelleftea, Sweden
jasalh-7@student.ltu.se
- Niclas Ogren
InfoVista Sweden AB, SE-931 62, Skelleftea, Sweden
niclas.ogren@infovista.com
- Dimitar Minovski
Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Lulea University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skelleftea, Sweden, InfoVista Sweden AB, SE-931 62, Skelleftea, Sweden
dimitar.minovski@ltu.se, dimitar.minovski@infovista.com
- Karl Andersson
Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Lulea University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skelleftea, Sweden
karl.andersson@ltu.se
Keywords: network performance, active measurement, available bandwidth, 4G/LTE
Abstract
Facts and figures indicate that the latest generations of cellular networks are likely to become the
dominant medium of the global data exchange. This may pose a challenge to service providers
trying to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) provided that is usually specified in Service Level
Agreement (SLA), which, in turn, has to be practically verified. It requires methods and tools to
measure the adopted QoS metrics such as bandwidth and Round-Trip Time (RTT). For this research,
the InfoVista’s proprietary tool (Blixt™) was used. The research discusses how the probing packet
parameters play a vital role in determining the accuracy of the measurements, the level of intrusiveness
in a shared-resources network, and its implications for sustainability for this application. The
experiments were carried out in a live commercial network and the performance was also compared
with other cutting-edge available bandwidth measurement tools in a multi-carrier scenario.