Abstract
The bandwidth demand of today’s mobile applications is permanently increasing. This requires more frequent upgrades of the mobile network capacity in the radio access as well as in the backhaul section. In such quickly evolving scenario, the risk of capacity bottleneck is increased, therefore network operators need tools to promptly detect capacity bottlenecks or, conversely, validate the current network state.To this end, we propose to exploit the passive observation of individual TCP connections. Being a closed loop protocol, the performances of every TCP connection depend on the status of the whole end-to-end path. Leveraging on this property, we propose a method to infer the presence of a capacity bottleneck along the path of an individual TCP connection by passively monitoring the DATA and ACK packets at a single monitoring point. We validate our approach with test traffic in a real 3G/4G operational network. The realized monitoring algorithm offers a powerful tool to network operators for on-line performance assessment and network troubleshooting.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Jaiswal, S., et al.: Measurement and classification of out-of-sequence packets in a tier-1 IP backbone. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 15(1), 54–66 (2007)
Jaiswal, S., et al.: Inferring TCP Connection Characteristics Through Passive Measurements. In: INFOCOM (2004)
Siekkinen, M., et al.: A root cause analysis toolkit for TCP. Computer Networks 52(9), 1846–1858 (2008)
Ricciato, F., Hasenleithner, E., Romirer-Maierhofer, P.: Traffic analysis at short time-scales: an empirical case study from a 3G cellular network. IEEE Trans. Netw. Service Manag. 31(8), 1484–1496
Ricciato, F.: Traffic monitoring and analysis for the optimization of a 3G network. IEEE Wireless Commun. (2006)
Ricciato, F., Vacirca, F., Svoboda, P.: Diagnosis of capacity bottlenecks via passive monitoring in 3G networks: An empirical analysis. Computer Networks 51(4) (2007)
Gerber, A., et al.: Speed testing without speed tests: estimating achievable download speed from passive measurements. In: Internet Measurement Conference. ACM (2010)
Romirer-Maierhofer, P., Ricciato, F., D’Alconzo, A., Franzan, R., Karner, W.: Network-Wide Measurements of TCP RTT in 3G. In: Papadopouli, M., Owezarski, P., Pras, A. (eds.) TMA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5537, pp. 17–25. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Laner, M., et al.: A comparison between one-way delays in operating HSPA and LTE networks. In: WINMEE 2012, 8th Int’l Workshop on Wireless Network Measurements, Paderborn, Germany (May 18, 2012)
Stevens, W.R.: TCP/IP Illustrated, vol. 1. Addison Wesley, Reading (1994)
Bär, et al.: DBStream: an online aggregation, filtering and processing system for network traffic monitoring. In: TRAC (2014)
Ricciato, F., et al.: Traffic monitoring and analysis in 3G networks: lessons learned from the METAWIN project. Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik 123(7-8), 288–296 (2006)
Bannister, J., Mather, P., Coope, S.: Convergence Technologies for 3G Networks: IP, UMTS, EGPRS and ATM. Wiley (2004)
Paxson, V., Allman, M.: Computing TCP’s Retransmission Timer. RFC 2988 (2000)
Allman, M., Paxson, V., Stevens, W.: TCP Congestion Control. RFC 2581 (April 1999)
Casas, P., Fiadino, P., Bär, A.: IP mining: Extracting knowledge from the dynamics of the internet addressing space. In: International Teletraffic Congress, pp. 1–9. IEEE (2013)
Jacobson, V., Braden, R., Borman, D.: RFC 1323: TCP Extensions for High Performance (May 1992)
Yang, P., et al.: TCP Congestion Avoidance Algorithm Identification. In: Proceedings of IEEE ICDCS, Minneapolis, MN (June 2011)
Jacobson, V.: Congestion Avoidance and Control. In: ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 273–288 (1988)
Xu, L., Harfoush, K., Rhee, I.: Binary Increase Congestion Control (BIC) for Fast Long-Distance Networks. In: INFOCOM (2004)
Ha, S., Rhee, I., Xu, L.: CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 42(5), 64–74 (2008)
Schatz, R., Hoßfeld, H., Casas, P.: Passive youtube qoE monitoring for ISPs. In: IMIS, Palermo, Italy, July 4-6. IEEE (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schiavone, M., Romirer-Maierhofer, P., Ricciato, F., Baiocchi, A. (2014). Towards Bottleneck Identification in Cellular Networks via Passive TCP Monitoring. In: Guo, S., Lloret, J., Manzoni, P., Ruehrup, S. (eds) Ad-hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks. ADHOC-NOW 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8487. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07425-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07425-2_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07424-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07425-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)