research-article

Detecting if LTE is the Bottleneck with BurstTracker

Authors:

Arjun Balasingam,

Kanthi Nagaraj,

Aaron SchulmanAuthors Info & Claims

MobiCom '19: The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

Article No.: 1, Pages 1 - 15

https://doi.org/10.1145/3300061.3300140

Published: 05 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We present BurstTracker, the first tool that developers can use to detect if the LTE downlink is the bottleneck for their applications. BurstTracker is driven by our discovery that the proprietary LTE downlink schedulers running on LTE base stations allocate resources to users in a way that reveals if a user's downlink queue runs empty during a download. We demonstrate that BurstTracker works across Tier-1 cellular providers and across a variety of network conditions. We also present a case study that shows how application developers can use this tool in practice. Surprisingly, with BurstTracker, we find that the LTE downlink may not be the bottleneck for video streaming on several Tier-1 providers, even during peak hours at busy locations. Rather, transparent TCP middleboxes deployed by these providers lead to downlink underutilization, because they force Slow-Start Restart. With a simple workaround, we improve video streaming bitrate on busy LTE links by 35%.

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691872
Liu ZDeng QTan ZQian ZZhang XSwami AKrishnamurthy SGanesan DLane NShi W(2024)M2HO: Mitigating the Adverse Effects of 5G Handovers on TCPProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690680(1089-1103)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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Index Terms

Detecting if LTE is the Bottleneck with BurstTracker
1. Networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

MobiCom '19: The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

August 2019

1017 pages

ISBN:9781450361699

DOI:10.1145/3300061

General Chairs:
Sharad Agarwal
Microsoft
,
Ben Greenstein
Google
,
Aruna Balasubramanian
Stony Brook University
,
Program Chairs:
Shyam Gollakota
University of Washington
,
Xinyu Zhang
University of California, San Diego

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing

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Published: 05 August 2019

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MobiCom '19: The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

October 21 - 25, 2019

Los Cabos, Mexico

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691872
Liu ZDeng QTan ZQian ZZhang XSwami AKrishnamurthy SGanesan DLane NShi W(2024)M2HO: Mitigating the Adverse Effects of 5G Handovers on TCPProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690680(1089-1103)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3636534.3690680
Jia YZhong YWang MGao JZhang PLiu XJin X(2024)Aquifer: Transparent Microsecond-scale Scheduling for vRAN WorkloadsIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2024.3440032(1-14)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2024.3440032
Tan ZZhao JLi YXu YGuo YLu S(2024)LDRP: Device-Centric Latency Diagnostic and Reduction for Cellular Networks Without RootIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.326780523:4(2748-2764)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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