CUP: Cellular Ultra-light Probe-based Available Bandwidth Estimation

Cellular networks provide an essential connectivity foundation for a sizable number of mobile devices and applications, making it compelling to measure their performance in regard to user experience. Although cellular infrastructure provides low-level mechanisms for network-specific performance measurements, there is still a distinct gap in discerning the actual application-level or user-perceivable performance from such methods. Put simply, there is little substitute for direct sampling and testing to measure end-to-end performance. Unfortunately, most existing technologies often fall quite short. Achievable Throughput tests use bulk TCP downloads to provide an accurate but costly (time, bandwidth, energy) view of network performance. Conversely, Available Bandwidth techniques offer improved speed and low cost but are woefully inaccurate when faced with the typical dynamics of cellular networks. In this paper, we propose CUP, a novel approach for Cellular Ultra-light Probe-based available bandwidth estimation that seeks to operate at the cost point of Available Bandwidth techniques while correcting accuracy issues by leveraging the intrinsic aggregation properties of cellular scheduling, coupled with intelligent packet timing trains and the application of Bayesian probabilistic analysis. By keeping the costs low with reasonable accuracy, our approach enables scaling both with respect to time (longitude) and space (user device density). We construct a CUP prototype to evaluate our approach under various demanding real-world cellular environments (longitudinal, driving, multiple vendors) to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.