On the Impact of Mobile Network Delays on Connection Establishment Performance of a Carrier Grade NAT Device

Abstract

IPv4 addresses are nearly exhausted worldwide. For some time until IPv6 becomes pervasive as an ultimate solution, deployment of Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) devices becomes necessary, especially in the mobile carriers' networks which anticipate a large and growing number of new users. In this context, we tackle the evaluation of the impact of inserting a CGN device in the network, and in conjunction with the mobile network communication delays. We compare the Connection Establishment Rate (CER) with or without a CGN device, also with or without the emulated mobile network communication delays. Against our anticipation, the types of time-varying mobile network delays do not have a significant impact on CER. The effect of the changing delay fades away in the aggregation of many user traffic at the core part of the network, even though the time-varying mobile network communication delays are individually and separately emulated for each user. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first to study the relationship between the CGN performance and the mobile network's communication delays. The result suggests that modeling the aggregate traffic trend Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org.

A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment

“…Donley et al [9] studied the impact of CGN deployment on Web browsing performance in one ISP. Ohara et al [32] simulated how CGNs can impact on TCP connection establishment in mobile networks. Finally, Skoberne et al presented a theoretical taxonomy of NAT deployments and discuss their possible impact on network performance [41].…”

IPv4 and IPv6 performance comparison in IPv6 LTE network

“…Such discrepancy results different network performance and characteristics, therefore, deserves a careful assessment. Most of literature works focused on assessing the network performance either on IPv4 based LTE network such as [1] [2], or on IPv6 based wired network such as [3][4] [5]. Since it is still in an early stage on IPv6 deployment to mobile networks, very little work has been done on the performance assessment on IPv6 based mobile networks.…”

Statistical network monitoring: Methodology and application to carrier-grade NAT

“…Another branch of studies has focused on understanding the impact of CGNs on users' QoS and application-level experience [33,34,35,36]. This paper falls in this category.…”

“…Škoberne et al [33] report a comprehensive classification of NATed scenarios and speculate about which impairments each of them could introduce. Ohara et al [34] present a set of results obtained in a testbed. Specifically, they analyze the impact of network delays on the TCP connection establishment with and without CGN.…”