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Unveiling the Missed 4.5G Performance In the Wild

In this paper, we study an important, yet unexplored problem in operational cellular networks: How close is the actual performance each mobile device gets in reality from what the device could have got at best? Fundamentally, this gauges the bridgeable performance gap for the device. It is deemed as the missed performance because the device fails to achieve the feasible, higher performance. In this work, we report our preliminary results that uncover, quantify, and understand such missed performance in the wild. We have conducted extensive measurements in the small city of West Lafayette, IN to quantify and analyze such performance gaps over four top-tier US carriers, all running 4.5G LTE-Advanced. Our study shows that, significant performance miss indeed happens and happens quite frequently. We have seen that, downlink throughput is merely 750 Kbps, while 47Mbps is available and feasible (60x miss) at one location; At more than 20% places, the missed data throughput (ratio) for four carriers is no less than 30 Mbps (7.4x, AT&T), 22.6 Mbps (6.8x, Verizon), 12.1 Mbps (6.9x, T-Mobile) and 25 Mbps (1.7x, Sprint), respectively. Even worse, such missed performance potentials can be readily reached with certain operations compatible with the current infrastructure (as confirmed by our study). We further analyze its root cause, and conclude that the current cellular practices on selecting serving cells should be held accountable.