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Gianluca Foddis2 , Rosario G. Garroppo1 , Stefano Giordano1 , Gregorio Procissi1 , Simone Roma1 , Simone Topazzi2
1
Dept. of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy
email: <first.last>@iet.unipi.it, simone.roma@ing.unipi.it
2
Telecom Italia, Torino, Italy
email: <first.last>@telecomitalia.it
Abstract—The deployment of LTE and the explosion of smart- II. R ELATED W ORKS
phones and tablet market increase the requirements of mobile
connectivity, together with a change in the users expectations Since the beginning of the mobile data era there has been
in terms of bandwidth, access speed, reliability and QoS man- a great interest on the characterization and measurement of
agement. In this new network scenario, traffic characterization mobile traffic. The different studies in this area can be classi-
and monitoring is of paramount relevance in order to prevent fied in terminal–based and network–based studies. Terminal–
possible pitfalls during the deployment of new services. Hence, based studies are aimed at characterizing applications and user
the paper presents the traffic analysis of a deployed eNodeB in behavior by acquiring data on terminals (as examples, see [1]
a commercial network. The analysis is aimed at detecting traffic and [2]), whereas the network–based ones attempt to evaluate
features at call and frame level, also accounting for the handset
types.
network performance and usage by measurement sessions
carried out through equipment installed in the network. Hence,
in this latter case the user has no information about the
underlying monitoring process.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In [3] the authors conducted a detailed measurement anal-
Long Term Evolution (LTE), the latest deployed cellular ysis of network resource usage and subscriber behavior by
network technology, delivers high-speed data services for using a large scale data set collected inside a 3G cellular data
mobile devices with advertised bandwidth matching and even network. They studied the behavior of mobile subscribers in
exceeding the home broadband network speeds. In particular, terms of the traffic they generate, their mobility and their
LTE provides higher throughput (e.g. up to 300 Mbps in activity, and find a significant variation of network usage
DL and 150 Mbps in UL exploiting advanced 4x4 MIMO among subscribers. Recently, in [4], the authors presented an
techniques and promising up to 1Gbps with LTE-A) and lower in–depth study of the interactions among applications, network
latency than its 3G predecessors (i.e., UMTS, HSPA+). The transport protocol, and the radio layer in the LTE system. They
explosion in the consumer market of smart-phones and tablets, highlighted that LTE has significantly shorter state promotion
together with the pervasive usage of social networks and delays and lower RTTs than those of 3G networks, and pointed
video on-demand has poured millions of new mobile users out various inefficiencies in TCP over LTE.
into the net, so that internet mobile traffic is expected to
exceed the traffic generated computers in the coming years. Despite the aforementioned papers, we deal with traffic
Given this new scenario, LTE technology needs extensive generated by new smartphones and handset devices, with high
studies aimed at experimentally understanding how network computing power and connectivity, absolutely comparable to
resources are utilized by real users in a deployed commercial the ones of commodity PCs and fixed networks respectively.
network setting. To this aim, the paper presents the analysis We do not consider the detailed analysis of TCP interaction
of traffic data acquired at one eNodeB of an Italian mobile with other protocols of LTE system, as presented in [4], since
operator. Traffic was treated according to security procedures our study is aimed at evaluating the traffic characteristics,
and properly anonymized to respect customers privacy. The in terms of devices behavior, duration and inter-arrival times
goal is to evaluate the characteristics of traffic at call level and between successive calls (or sessions), and applications traffic
frame level. In particular, at call level, the analysis accounts for volume, as observed at the LTE eNodeB.
the duration of calls and the inter–arrival times of successive
calls, whereas at the frame level the focus is on the applications III. M EASUREMENT S CENARIO
and on the volume of traffic they generate.
The monitored eNodeB is operative in the bandwidth of
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II 1800 MHz, and is located in a business area of Turin. Three
provides a survey on previous researches concerning traffic different measurement sessions have been carried out, each
measurements in mobile networks, while section III describes one lasted one week, in the spring, the summer and the fall
the measurement scenario. Sections IV and V report and 2013, respectively . The three sessions mostly spot the same
discuss the main results of the analysis at the call and frame qualitatively results. From now, we’ll refer to these as week1,
levels, respectively. Finally, section VI concludes the paper and week2 and week3. Due to the higher amount of data, in
sketches possible extension of this work. sections IV and V all figures refer to week2 and week3.
TABLE I. N UMBER OF O BSERVED C ALLS FOR E ACH C ONSIDERED D EVICE
Measurement Session SmartphoneA TabletA SmartphoneB Other
Week1 1725 (67,43%) 465 (17,59%) 167 (6,52%) 197 (7,70%)
Week2 3320 (50,54%) 2619 (39,86%) 401 (6,1%) 229 (3,48%)
Week3 4364 (58,19%) 498 (6,64%) 1482 (19,76%) 1155 (15,41%)
50 0.6
40
0.4
30
20 0.2
SmartphoneA
10 SmartphoneB
TabletA
0
0 0 200 400 600 800 1000
SmartB TabletA SmartA Other Duration [sec]
Fig. 2. Device Distibution Fig. 3. Call Duration Times, CD : SmartphoneA vs TabletA vs SmartphoneB
0.02
customers like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and so on.
0.2
0.01
We analyzed the observed DNS queries and responses.
0
0 200 400 600 800
0
1000 In particular, we checked if the DNS hostname contained
Gap [sec]
(c) SmartphoneB patterns correlated to one of the aforementioned applications.
For example, string as icloud or itunes belong to Apple
Fig. 4. Call Interarrival Times: SmartphoneA vs TabletA vs SmartphoneB application, whereas fbstatic or fbexternal belong to Facebook
application. The results are summarized in Table II, which
reports the percentage of occurrences for each considered
application during each day of week2.
The results show a low percentage of YouTube (with a
peak of 9% on Saturday) with respect to the other popular
applications and a high percentage of non classified occur-
rences (”Other” in the Table), mostly referring to generic
Web browsing with a small component of applications such
as Twitter, Whatsapp or Instagram. It is interesting to note a
(a) Week (b) One Day large percentage of gaming during Monday and Tuesday, about
32 and 35% respectively. During the week, the percentage of
Fig. 5. Throughput: Whole Week vs One Day Facebook and Apple occurrences is quite stable, in the range
7-24% the former and around 20% the latter. Mail is in the
range 10-20%, with a peak at 26% on Friday.
V. M EASUREMENT R ESULTS AT THE F RAME L EVEL
A further analysis is aimed at evaluating the traffic volume
A. Throughput analysis and the session duration for each application. In particular,
The first analysis focuses on the UP throughput observed we detect the frames exchanged for each connection using the
during one of the considered weeks. The results reported in canonical 5-tuple: Protocol, IP source address, IP destination
Figure 5(a) shows that in general the network load is quite address, layer 4 source port, layer 4 destination port. Then, we
low. This is mainly due to the early stage of LTE services. detected the packets belonging to each connection, and com-
Furthermore, we observed that during the week-end (Saturday puted the number of exchanged bytes as well as the duration
and Sunday), the traffic is almost zero. This observation can of connections. By using the information of DNS queries, we
be explained taking into account that the monitored eNodeB resolved IP destination addresses with the associated hostname
is located in a business area of Turin. Hence, we can deduce and joined each observed connection to a specific service.
that the main part of traffic is generated by workers during the
We defined and analyzed the sessions of the main applica-
week. Moreover, the results show that, typically, the maximum
tions observed in the measurements. For ease of presentation,
throughput is reached in the interval 12:00–16:00 (e.g. the
in the following we report the results for Facebook and Mail
lunch break and the early afternoon), and then it progressively
only. First of all, we need to define one Facebook session.
decreases. Of course, this characteristic enforces the idea that
Mainly, we are interested on the impact of Facebok usage
LTE devices are not yet spread outside business environment,
from a network perspective. We generate several traces in a
although some application bandwidth consuming, such as
controlled fashion to define the signature for the beginning of
video streaming, are used during the work break times.
a session. Taking into account our results and previous studies
The next step is to analyze the day–by–day throughput and ([7], [8]) we find that approximately 6-7 TCP connections are
to focus on the most popular applications. As an example, opened when the user activates its Facebook App. We suppose
we propose the throughput profile of one day, shown in that when all Facebook connections are closed, or when the
Figure 5(b). The figure points out that the most important users leave the cell, the session is closed. The statistics on
traffic volume is provided by one user that established an the sessions duration and the traffic volume exchanged during
HTTP video streaming session. Indeed, during this session, the the sessions are summarized in the scatter plot (Figure 6). The
average throughput is about 21 Mbit/s, more than 20% of the scatter plot reports a set of points, where each point represents
TABLE II. S TATISTICS OF THE N ETWORK S CENARIOS
Facebook Apple Akamai Google Mail YouTube Other (Web browsing, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc.)
Sunday 24,34% 21,55% 10,65% 7,05% 9,50% 0,61% 35,04%
Monday 8,27% 5,56% 1,03% 16,19% 8,47% 1,64% 52,87%
Tuesday 7,95% 22,08% 9,04% 8,08% 10,34% 0,51% 47,27%
Wednesday 7,63% 11,51% 1,1% 9,42% 10,17% 2,72% 41,24%
Thursday 14,69% 14,97% 2,15% 9,89% 12,08% 3,21% 38,57%
Friday 17,08% 21,93% 6,95% 7,42% 26,89% 0,93% 19,93%
Saturady 18,75% 18,24% 8,73% 5,96% 7,01% 9,24% 35,28%
600 70
dated more times but not necessarily a larger amount
60
500 of data is downloaded;
50
Time [Minutes]
Time [Minutes]
400
40 • some calls expire in very short time, but generate
300
30 many Kbytes of network traffic. This is probably due
200
20 to the download of large attachments.
100 10