MOBILE SECURITY & TELECOM NETWORKS

HSPA Latency
INTRODUCTION
• In todays World, spread of mobile broadband is gaining pace and it is now
common for users to get a mobile broadband connection instead of a fixed
broadband connection, meaning that a decent user experience is needed–
fast, responsive, always on and available for use.

• While the focus in user experience so far has been on maximum bitrates,
fact is that after a certain level of throughput has been achieved, actually
latency is sometimes even more important than the throughput, or bit rate,
offered.
• Some services, such as online gaming, video conference can be
impossible to offer with connections that have a high latency/delay.
WHY DOES LATENCY MATTER?
• As most of the end user applications used over the Internet are based on
TCP, latency is crucial to the broadband experience. TCP requires the
recipient of a packet to acknowledge its receipt. If the sender does not
receive a receipt in a certain amount of time (ms), TCP assumes that the
connection is congested and slows down the rate at which it sends packets.

• “Typically, more than 80% of all data bursts in data networks are so small
(<100kB) that they are more sensitive to latency than throughput.” - Source:
Major global CSP

• Evidently, fast response times matter. With low latency, the end user has a
better experience of Web browsing, as Web page pages download more
quickly.
WHAT IS LATENCY
• Latency and throughput are the essential factors in network performance and
they define the speed of a network. Whereas throughput is the quantity of
data that can pass from source to destination in a specific time, round trip
time (RTT) latency is the time it takes for a single data transaction to occur,
meaning the time it takes for the packet of data to travel to and from the
destination, back to the source. Latency is measured in milliseconds (ms).

• In simple words latency is the time from a user sending a piece of data, e.g.
requesting a download or a Web page to load, to the time when the user
gets a response
GRAPHICAL COMPARISON

GSM/EDGE

i-HSPA

DSL Min
Max

LTE

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Latency(ms)
HOW DOES HSPA ACHIEVE LOWER LATENCY
MS
EDGE MS

BTS
BTS(built-
in RNC)
RNC

SGSN
SGSN

GGSN
GGSN HSPA

INTERNET INTERNET
CONCLUSION
• We can say that latency is relatively more important to the consumer mobile
broadband experience than data rates, especially as we tend towards higher
data rates as in HSPA

• Its is important that the data has to go through as few nodes as possible to
achieve lowest latency.

• Questions?