End-to-end key performance indicators in cellular networks

Abstract

The continuing growth of customers taking advantage of the available services means greater load on the cellular network. Optimization is the key to ensure that the network can provide a reasonable level of service-quality. Service providers want to examine their network and be assured that their network is performing well. Teleca Wireless Solutions is a company that does this for service providers, and an end-toend test tool could be proven useful to examine the cellular networks overall performance from an end users point of view. To ensure that one has a tool that does this in an appropriate way, one must ensure, the application is based on testing the right key performance indicators for relevant services. Such services may be popular services like FTP and WEB. In this thesis, we have researched what affects the end users performance and performed practical end-to-end performance tests in cellular networks. Our goal is to define which key performance indicators are affecting the network’s performance at different network layers and for different services. We have paid special attendance to the high latency of the wireless links, and the delay introduced with the radio access bearer establishment. By measurements we have shown that the 3rd generation cellular network UMTS not surprisingly outperforms EDGE regarding commonly used services like HTTP/WEB and FTP. We have discovered that while TCP throughput is good when transferring large files over FTP, the high latency of the wireless link makes the HTTP performance bad compared to potential TCP throughput. Our work has concluded with which key performance indicators an end-to-end test application should measure for services as HTTP and FTP, to give an overall view of the cellular network’s performance. We have proposed enhancements to an already existing end-to-end test tool.