Passive client-based bandwidth and latency measurements in cellular networks

Measurements of network parameters like bandwidths and latencies in wireless networks entail some new challenges. Especially cellular networks are highly dynamic furthermore, the potential mobility of the client can lead to frequent and spontaneous changes in the communication properties. Cellular networks are a shared medium, therefore, bandwidth is precious and should not be wasted. Thus, an important question is whether and how measurements can be performed without generating additional traffic, i.e., using traffic analysis and exploiting the properties of various protocols and their options. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of various passive approaches to measure bandwidth and latency in cellular networks at runtime. We present an implementation which considers multiple protocols and passive analysis approaches as well as TCP timestamps and a filter for delayed acknowledgements. The evaluation demonstrates the accuracy and precision of the selected methods in cellular networks.