Behaviors of High-Frequency Subscribers in Cellular Data Networks

Cellular networks operate under restrictive constraints of resources including radio channel capacity and network processing capability. The tremendous growth in the cellular data network usage brings operators with unprecedented signaling overloads and threatens the stability of the network. High-frequency subscribers, who produce low data volume but cause high signaling overhead, are extremely resource-inefficient. For subscribers who activate more than 5 sessions per hour, they only account for 1.19% of the total subscribers and generate about 3.81% data traffic but consume roughly 19.46% of the signaling resources, resulting in the inconsistent signaling-data bandwidth consumptions. Understanding the characteristics of those users has an important significance of capacity design and optimal allocation of resources. A lack of understanding of this active group potentially leads to low network performance and security threats. In this paper, we perform the first city-wide, large-scale investigation of high-frequency subscribers. By applying a set of novel approaches, such as pattern extraction and user behavior rebuilding, we observed that high-frequency subscribers correspond to a lower percentage of none-pattern traffic, showing positive correlation between access regularity and session activation frequency. Besides, we found that amount of high-frequency subscribers has abnormal behaviors, resulting in unwanted signaling loads. We demonstrate that our findings have significant implications on network optimization.

Protecting Download Traffic from Upload Traffic over Asymmetric Wireless Links

Many varied mobile device networks have been developed with the advancement of communication and network technologies. Cellular data networks are currently the most widely used, and the number of cellular network subscriptions has increased steadily. Most recent wireless access technologies employ asymmetric uplinks and downlinks because mobile subscribers usually download contents from the Internet. Therefore, most cellular network service providers allocate more bandwidth to downlinks than uplinks for mobile subscribers. However, this asymmetry can have unexpected influence on network performance, particularly TCP performance. When the uplink interface is congested, TCP ACK packets are delayed by TCP data packets on the uplink, causing considerable TCP retransmissions on the downlink channel. Thus, downlink bandwidth cannot be fully utilized, which results in significantly degraded downlink throughput. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a feedback scheme, network traffic chunk regulator (NCR). We analyzed the aforementioned problem through the empirical study, and we designed and implemented NCR based on the analysis. NCR adaptively controls TCP according to the degree of link usage asymmetry. We evaluate NCR performance through simulations and experiments with real devices. We verify that the proposed scheme allows the downlink traffic to not interfere with the aggressive uplink traffic. Thus, NCR increases total link utilization and aggregated throughput significantly, without imposing additional overhead on base or mobile stations.