Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications

Xinlei Yang; Hao Lin; Zhenhua Li; Feng Qian; Xingyao Li; Zhiming He; Xudong Wu; Xianlong Wang; Yunhao Liu; Zhi Liao; Daqiang Hu; Tianyin Xu

doi:10.1145/3544216.3544237

Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications

Xinlei Yang, Hao Lin, Zhenhua Li, Feng Qian, Xingyao Li, Zhiming He, Xudong Wu, Xianlong Wang, Yunhao Liu, Zhi Liao, Daqiang Hu, Tianyin Xu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Recent advances in mobile technologies such as 5G and WiFi 6E do not seem to deliver the promised mobile access bandwidth. To effectively characterize mobile access bandwidth in the wild, we work with a major commercial mobile bandwidth testing app to analyze mobile access bandwidths of 3.54M end users in China, based on fine-grained measurement and diagnostic information. Our analysis presents a surprising and frustrating fact-in the past two years, the average WiFi bandwidth remains largely unchanged, while the average 4G/5G bandwidth decreases remarkably. Our analysis further reveals the root causes-The bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure (e.g., devices and wired Internet access) and side effects of aggressively migrating radio resources from 4G to 5G-with implications on closing the technology gaps. Additionally, our analysis provides insights on building ultra-fast, ultra-light bandwidth testing services (BTSes) at scale. Our new design dramatically reduces the test time of the commercial BTS from 10 seconds to 1 second on average, with a 15× reduction on the backend cost.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	114-128
Number of pages	15
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450394208
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544237
State	Published - Aug 22 2022
Event	2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022 - Amsterdam, Netherlands Duration: Aug 22 2022 → Aug 26 2022

Publication series

Name	SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference

Conference

Conference	2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022
Country/Territory	Netherlands
City	Amsterdam
Period	8/22/22 → 8/26/22

Keywords

LTE/5G network
access bandwidth
bandwidth testing
mobile network
wifi network

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Computer Networks and Communications
Hardware and Architecture

Online availability

10.1145/3544216.3544237

Library availability

Discover UIUC Full Text

Cite this

Yang, X., Lin, H., Li, Z., Qian, F., Li, X., He, Z., Wu, X., Wang, X., Liu, Y., Liao, Z., Hu, D., & Xu, T. (2022). Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications. In SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference (pp. 114-128). (SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544237

Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications. / Yang, Xinlei; Lin, Hao; Li, Zhenhua et al.
SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, 2022. p. 114-128 (SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Yang, X, Lin, H, Li, Z, Qian, F, Li, X, He, Z, Wu, X, Wang, X, Liu, Y, Liao, Z, Hu, D & Xu, T 2022, Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications. in SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference. SIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 114-128, 2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 8/22/22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544237

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Mobile access bandwidth in practice: Measurement, analysis, and implications

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Online availability

Library availability

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