Measuring quality of experience of internet access over HSDPA

Abstract

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is being introduced by mobile operators as a solution both for increasing the downlink throughput and for achieving a more efficient usage of the radio resources. This work analyses the quality of experience of HSDPA users, based on experiments and measurements over a commercial network. The effect of multiple users sharing the overall capacity of the cell is explicitly evaluated. The results show that the HSDPA user experience for Internet access is satisfactory and in some cases comparable to that achievable over fixed access technologies such as ADSL. In addition, we explore the impact of TCP configuration on the HSDPA performance and suggest suitable parameter values. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.