Towards understanding interruption and reordering in HSPA/HSPA+ networks

Abstract

In this paper, we quantify reordering and connection interruption while downloading data to mobile phones in modern HSPA/HSPA+ mobile networks based on end-to-end measurements conducted in commercial operator networks. We show how these events are affected by phone model, operator, time of the day, user movement and signal strength. We find that phone model, time of day and user movement affect the number of connection interruptions, but not their length. Data loss during interruptions is influenced by operator and time of day. The number of reordering events is impacted by the operator and the time of day, the operator additionally affects the reordering extent. This improves the understanding of HSPA/HSPA+ networks and enables further research to improve the data transfer and methods for delay spike prevention.

I'll be a bit late — packet reordering in mobile networks

“…The measurement against the servers consists of 10 s TCP bulk transfer throughput tests for upload as well as download, [24], [13]. We note that all analyze mobile operator networks are connected to a single Internet Exchange Point (IXP) which is directly connected to the university network as well.…”

“…In this section, we investigate which TCP options are useful in detecting and measuring the reordering characteristic and illustrate this in a descriptive way. The full algorithmic details are available [12] as is the implementation [13].…”

“…For mobile networks we have not found any similar work, except our own [13] where we discuss the impact of client context. While reordering has been mentioned in [1], they are measuring how late packets are while not distinguishing between reordering and packet loss.…”