Delay metrics and delay characteristics: A study of four Swedish HSDPA+ and LTE networks

Network delays and user perceived latencies are of major importance in many applications in cellular networks. Delays can be measured with multiple approaches and at different protocol layers. This work involves a detailed examination of several delay metrics from a network, transport, and application perspective. The study explores base delay as well as latency under load, capturing also the effect of buffering. The examination is based on a comprehensive active measurement campaign performed in the networks of four Swedish operators. The results show that the delay captured by different metrics can vary significantly, with delay captured from the TCP three-way-handshake and adaptive ping measurements giving the most consistent results for base network delay in our measurements. As expected, when background traffic is introduced measured delay increases by an order of magnitude due to buffering in the network, highlighting the importance of also capturing latency under load when describing network performance. Finally, using an analytic model of flow completion time, we show that well-selected network measurements can provide a good prediction of higher layer delay performance.