Searching for mobile mice and elephants in GPRS networks
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review
Quantifying Skype user satisfaction
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We compare Web traffic characteristics of mobile- versus fixed-access end-hosts, where herein the term "mobile" refers to access via cell towers, using for example the 3G/UMTS standard, and the term "fixed" includes Wi-Fi access. It is well-known that connection speeds are in general slower over mobile-access networks, and also that often there is higher packet loss. We were curious whether this leads mobile-access users to have smaller connections. We examined the bytes-per-connection and packet loss based on packet retransmissions from a sampling of logs from servers of Akamai Technologies. We obtained 149 million connections, across 51 countries. The mean bytes-per-connection was typically larger for fixed-access: for two-thirds of the countries, it was at least one-third larger. Regarding distributions, we found that the difference between the bytes-per-connection for mobile- versus fixed-access was statistically significant for each of the countries, and likewise for packet loss. However, the difference is typically small. For some countries, mobile-access had the larger connections. As expected, mobile-access often had higher packet loss than fixed-access, but the reverse pertained for some countries. Typically packet loss increased during the busy period of the day, when mobile-access had a larger increase.