research-article

iCellSpeed: increasing cellular data speed with device-assisted cell selection

Authors:

Chunyi PengAuthors Info & Claims

MobiCom '20: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

Article No.: 44, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/3372224.3419201

Published: 18 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose iCellSpeed, an on-device solution to increase data access speed by substantiating unrealized performance potentials. We find that performance potentials are missed in today's mobile networks, as the data speed a user device gets is much lower than what the device could get. The issue is rooted in the current cell selection practice, which misses good candidate cells that offer faster access speed, thus under-utilizing the available capabilities in mobile networks. We design iCellSpeed to facilitate network-controlled cell selection with proactive device-side assistance towards more desirable cells. Our evaluation over AT&T and Verizon confirms its effectiveness. iCellSpeed increases data access speed by more than 10 Mbps at 79% of test locations (> 25Mbps at 29% of locations, up to 80.6 Mbps). It doubles access speed at 62.5% of locations with the gain up to 28.4x. Datasets are available at [9].

References

[1]

2016. AT Command User Guide. http://gamma.spb.ru/images/pdf/L506_AT_Command_User_Guide_V2.1.pdf. Access: 01/24/2020.

[2]

2016. How to lock on a specific cell tower on Samsung Galaxy S6. https://www.violetgem.com/blog/lte-wcdma-gsm-how-to-lock-on-a-specific-cell-tower-on-samsung-galaxy-s6/. Access: 01/12/2020.

[3]

2019. MobileInsight. http://www.mobileinsight.net, 2019.

[4]

2020. 5G Speed Report: Early 5G Experience Provides Mixed Results. https://www.telecompetitor.com/5g-speed-report-early-5g-experience-provides-mixed-results/. Access: 03/01/2020.

[5]

2020. Android Open Source Project. https://source.android.com/. Access: 01/19/2020.

[6]

2020. Android.Telephony. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/package-summary.html. Access: 01/20/2020.

[7]

2020. BITMOVIN Demos and Code Examples. https://bitmovin.com/demos/. Access: 06/20/2020.

[8]

2020. Codes Google Pixel. https://www.hardreset.info/devices/google/google-pixel/codes/. Access: 01/19/2020.

[9]

2020. iCellSpeed Datasets. https://github.com/mssn/iCellSpeed-Dataset.

[10]

2020. Network Signal Guru. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com. qtrun.QuickTest. Access: 01/21/2020.

[11]

2020. Radio Layer Interface. https://wladimir-tm4pda.github.io/porting/telephony.html. Access: 06/21/2020.

[12]

3GPP. 2013. Carrier Aggregation explained. https://www.3gpp.org/technologies/keywords-acronyms/101-carrier-aggregation-explained.

[13]

3GPP. 2019. TS23.502: Procedures for the 5G System (5GS). V15.8.0 (Release 15).

[14]

3GPP. 2019. TS36.101: E-UTRA; User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception. V15.6.0 (Release 15).

[15]

3GPP. 2020. TS36.331: E-UTRA; Radio Resource Control (RRC). V15.9.0 (Release 15).

[16]

Arjun Balasingam, Manu Bansal, Rakesh Misra, Kanthi Nagaraj, Rahul Tandra, Sachin Katti, and Aaron Schulman. 2019. Detecting if LTE is the Bottleneck with BurstTracker. In The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'19).

Digital Library

[17]

Arthur P Dempster, NanM Laird, and Donald B Rubin. 1977. Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 39, 1 (1977), 1--22.

[18]

Haotian Deng, Kai Ling, Junpeng Guo, and Chunyi Peng. 2020. Unveiling the Missed 4.5G Performance In the Wild. In Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (Austin, TX, USA) (HotMobile'20).

Digital Library

[19]

Haotian Deng, Chunyi Peng, Ans Fida, Jiayi Meng, and Charlie Hu. 2018. Mobility Support in Cellular Networks: A Measurement Study on Its Configurations and Implications. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Boston, MA, USA) (IMC'18).

Digital Library

[20]

Prateesh Goyal, Anup Agarwal, Ravi Netravali, Mohammad Alizadeh, and Hari Balakrishnan. 2020. ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Networks. In USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'20).

[21]

Yuanjie Li, Haotian Deng, Jiayao Li, Chunyi Peng, and Songwu Lu. 2016. Instability in Distributed Mobility Management: Revisiting Configuration Management in 3G/4G Mobile Networks. In ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Science (Antibes Juan-Les-Pins, France) (SIGMETRICS'16).

Digital Library

[22]

Yuanjie Li, Haotian Deng, Chunyi Peng, Guan-Hua Tu, Jiayao Li, Zengwen Yuan, and Songwu Lu. 2016. iCellular: Define Your Own Cellular Network Access on Commodity Smartphones. In USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (Santa Clara, CA, USA) (NSDI'16). 643--656.

[23]

Yuanjie Li, Chunyi Peng, Zengwen Yuan, Jiayao Li, Haotian Deng, and Tao Wang. 2016. MobileInsight: Extracting and Analyzing Cellular Network Information on Smartphones. In ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'16).

Digital Library

[24]

Ashkan Nikravesh, Yihua Guo, Xiao Zhu, Feng Qian, and Z Morley Mao. 2019. MP-H2: A Client-only Multipath Solution for HTTP/2. In The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'19).

Digital Library

[25]

Zhaowei Tan, Yuanjie Li, Qianru Li, Zhehui Zhang, Zhehan Li, and Songwu Lu. 2018. Supporting mobile VR in LTE networks: How close are we? Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems 2, 1 (2018), 1--31.

Digital Library

[26]

Leslie G Valiant. 1984. A theory of the learnable. In Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM, 436--445.

Digital Library

[27]

Wikipedia. 2017. LTE Frequency bands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands.

[28]

Xiufeng Xie, Xinyu Zhang, and Shilin Zhu. 2017. Accelerating Mobile Web Loading Using Cellular Link Information. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'17).

Digital Library

[29]

Shichang Xu, Ashkan Nikravesh, and Z Morley Mao. 2019. Leveraging Context-Triggered Measurements to Characterize LTE Handover Performance. In PAM.

Cited By

Huang JLiu YPeng CXu CDavies N(2024)Poster: Uncovering Missed 5G Performance in the SkyProceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3638550.3643051(137-137)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638550.3643051
Liu YHuang JPeng C(2024)The Sky is Not the Limit: Unveiling Operational 5G Potentials in the Sky2024 IEEE/ACM 32nd International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS61813.2024.10682913(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWQoS61813.2024.10682913
Zhang ZLiu YLi QLiu ZPeng CLu S(2023)Dependent Misconfigurations in 5G/4.5G Radio Resource ControlProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/35952881:CoNEXT1(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3595288
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

iCellSpeed: increasing cellular data speed with device-assisted cell selection
1. Networks

Recommendations

Facilitating Initial Cell Selection in Dense Heterogeneous Network Using Mobile Speed Classification
IIH-MSP '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing

Dense heterogeneous networks (HetNets) that comprise a number of small cells and their overlay macro cells is viewed as the solution for supporting explosive-growth user traffic in the next decade. In order to reduce the number of handovers in HetNets, ...
User-Driven Handover Scheme in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Macro/Femto Cells for High Speed Scenarios
BDAW '16: Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data and Advanced Wireless Technologies

Ubiquitous communication depends upon an expanded capacity and suitable Quality of Service (QoS). To meet these requirements, LTE mobile network providers deploy small cells in shadow zones and next to base station to increase the network capacity and ...
A novel cell-selection optimization handover for long-term evolution (LTE) macrocellusing fuzzy TOPSIS

Optimal cell-selection scheme that allows a roaming UE to reconnect to the most suitable cell while maintaining its quality of service (QoS) requirements.Very low ping-pong handover ratio and handover failure ratio.Higher cell throughput ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MobiCom '20: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

April 2020

621 pages

ISBN:9781450370851

DOI:10.1145/3372224

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

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

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 September 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

MobiCom '20

Sponsor:

SIGMOBILE

MobiCom '20: The 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

September 21 - 25, 2020

London, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
611
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)59
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 23 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Huang JLiu YPeng CXu CDavies N(2024)Poster: Uncovering Missed 5G Performance in the SkyProceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3638550.3643051(137-137)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638550.3643051
Liu YHuang JPeng C(2024)The Sky is Not the Limit: Unveiling Operational 5G Potentials in the Sky2024 IEEE/ACM 32nd International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS61813.2024.10682913(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWQoS61813.2024.10682913
Zhang ZLiu YLi QLiu ZPeng CLu S(2023)Dependent Misconfigurations in 5G/4.5G Radio Resource ControlProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/35952881:CoNEXT1(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3595288
Li QZhang ZLiu YTan ZPeng CLu SCosta XHassanieh HAsadi ACox LPerino DWidmer JGiustiniano D(2023)CA++: Enhancing Carrier Aggregation Beyond 5GProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3592500(1-14)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570361.3592500
刘云李振李洋林灏宫良郑雅(2022)Recency effect and self-regulating design of mobile cellular systems in the context of interlaced generations: network bandwidth, power efficiency, and connection reliabilitySCIENTIA SINICA Informationis10.1360/SSI-2022-0062Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1360/SSI-2022-0062
Zhao JTan ZXu YZhang ZLu SKuipers FOrda A(2022)SEEDProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544260(129-142)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544260
Hassan ANarayanan AZhang AYe WZhu RJin SCarpenter JMao ZQian FZhang ZKuipers FOrda A(2022)Vivisecting mobility management in 5G cellular networksProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544217(86-100)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544217
Fida MOcampo AElmokashfi A(2022)Measuring and Localising Congestion in Mobile Broadband NetworksIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.311572219:1(366-380)Online publication date: Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2021.3115722
Coronado ESiddiqui SRiggio R(2022)Roadrunner: O-RAN-based Cell Selection in Beyond 5G NetworksNOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789832(1-7)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789832
Li QPeng C(2021)Reconfiguring Cell Selection in 4G/5G Networks2021 IEEE 29th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP52444.2021.9651984(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP52444.2021.9651984

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents