Abstract
In cellular networks, handover plays a vital role in supporting mobility and connectivity. Traditionally, handovers in a cellular network focus on maintaining continuous connectivity for legacy voice calls. However, there is a poor understanding of how today’s handover strategies impact the network performance, especially for applications that require reliable Internet connectivity.
In this work, using a newly designed context-triggered measurement framework, we carry out the first comprehensive measurement study in LTE networks on how handover decisions implemented by carriers impact network layer performance. We find that the interruption in connectivity during handover is minimal, but in 43% of cases the end-to-end throughput degrades after the handover. The cause is that the deployed handover policy uses statically configured signal strength threshold as the key factor to decide handover and focuses on improving signal strength which by itself is an imperfect metric for performance. We propose that handover decision strategies trigger handover based on predicted performance considering factors such as cell load along with application preference.
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Notes
- 1.
Each cellular base station has one or more set of antennas and it communicates with the mobile devices in one or more sectors called cells each of which has a unique ID [7].
- 2.
We confirm the inferred handover policy from PHONELAB are still current with the newer MobileInsight dataset as described later in Sect. 4.
- 3.
The MobileInsight dataset does not have active measurements on network performance.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partially supported by NSF under the grants CCF-1628991 and CNS-1629763.
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Xu, S., Nikravesh, A., Mao, Z.M. (2019). Leveraging Context-Triggered Measurements to Characterize LTE Handover Performance. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_1
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