Throughput measurement in 4G wireless data networks: Performance evaluation and validation

Wireless data networks, particularly 4th generation (4G) and long-term evolution (LTE) are rapidly gaining ground as predominant telecommunication services to provide high quality services to wireless end-user consumer (WEC). This growth is in response to insatiably increasing popularity and penetration of mobile devices among individual, corporates, business, and government service consumers. Beside adequate resource provisioning and design, ensuring the quality of service (QoS) to WEC is the key in successful adoption of such state-of-the-art wireless communication technologies in national/international scope. Network throughput is one of the key network performance metrics for QoS among end-users. However, demonstrating reliability and validity of network throughput measurement deployed in vendor end-point is a critical task. Moreover, WECs demand reliable, accurate, and consistent tools and methodology that help them to measure network throughput at their end-point. Network service vendors are also interested to predict the future throughput based on historical data from the past. In this paper, we devise a methodology to accurately measure throughput of the 4G WiMAX data network in real wireless environment from end-users perspective. We experimentally and mathematically evaluate the performance of the proposed model and validate our findings using the observed results from OOKLA as a predominant network monitoring tool. Based on the results, we suggest an intelligent monitoring system in corporation of both Iperf and OOKLA that not only can measure the momentous throughput, but also can predict the future throughput based on previous throughput data.