The illusion of being deterministic - application-level considerations on delay in 3G HSPA networks (work in progress)

Abstract

The delay experienced by mobile applications in HSPA networks depends to a large extent on highly dynamical global context like, e.g., cell load or algorithms and thresholds governing radio resource scheduling, and on local context like, e.g., user-generated load or load history. These complex uncertainty factors are outside of an applications sphere of influence and result in applications perceiving HSPA link behavior as non-deterministic and non-reproducible. This paper analyzes accurate round-trip and one-way delay measurement results for three public HSPA networks to demonstrate the high degree of network non-determinism which mobile applications are likely to encounter in practice, particularly significant payload-dependence and halved delay on slightly increased user-generated link load.We argue that current HSPA radio link schedulers, relying on instantaneous user load as decision criterion for channel capacity allocation, neglect real-time application requirements. Cross-layer optimization is one solution which enables deterministic scheduler decisions based on application requirements. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.