Passive estimation of TCP round-trip times
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
UCAN: a unified cellular and ad-hoc network architecture
Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Experiences in a 3G network: interplay between the wireless channel and applications
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Energy consumption in mobile phones: a measurement study and implications for network applications
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Anatomizing application performance differences on smartphones
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Cellular traffic offloading through opportunistic communications: a case study
Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Challenged networks
Bartendr: a practical approach to energy-aware cellular data scheduling
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Characterizing radio resource allocation for 3G networks
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Characterizing and modeling internet traffic dynamics of cellular devices
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
TOP: Tail Optimization Protocol For Cellular Radio Resource Allocation
ICNP '10 Proceedings of the The 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
Identifying diverse usage behaviors of smartphone apps
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
A first look at cellular machine-to-machine traffic: large scale measurement and characterization
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
RILAnalyzer: a comprehensive 3G monitor on your phone
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference
Understanding the super-sized traffic of the super bowl
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference
Leveraging diversity to optimize performance in mobile networks
Proceedings of the 2013 workshop on Student workhop
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During crowded events, cellular networks face voice and data traffic volumes that are often orders of magnitude higher than what they face during routine days. Despite the use of portable base stations for temporarily increasing communication capacity and free Wi-Fi access points for offloading Internet traffic from cellular base stations, crowded events still present significant challenges for cellular network operators looking to reduce dropped call events and improve Internet speeds. For effective cellular network design, management, and optimization, it is crucial to understand how cellular network performance degrades during crowded events, what causes this degradation, and how practical mitigation schemes would perform in real-life crowded events. This paper makes a first step towards this end by characterizing the operational performance of a tier-1 cellular network in the United States during two high-profile crowded events in 2012. We illustrate how the changes in population distribution, user behavior, and application workload during crowded events result in significant voice and data performance degradation, including more than two orders of magnitude increase in connection failures. Our findings suggest two mechanisms that can improve performance without resorting to costly infrastructure changes: radio resource allocation tuning and opportunistic connection sharing. Using trace-driven simulations, we show that more aggressive release of radio resources via 1-2 seconds shorter RRC timeouts as compared to routine days helps to achieve better tradeoff between wasted radio resources, energy consumption, and delay during crowded events; and opportunistic connection sharing can reduce connection failures by 95% when employed by a small number of devices in each cell sector.