Hidden costs of mobile data access in cellular networks (Invited paper)

In mobile data access, cellular operators usually charge users purely based on the delivered data volume. However, the actual used radio resources in transmitting the same amount of data might be significantly different in various traffic patterns. In this paper, we conduct a in-depth study to unveil the radio resource consumption for mobile data transfer. We disclose that radio resources are consumed not only for data transfer but also for control signals and the overhead of channel allocation. We further develop an approach to quantify the total radio resource costs, particularly the hidden costs of signaling messages and dedicated channels. We have conducted measurement of various mobile apps in two operational cellular networks. The results reveal huge hidden costs in some always-online apps and demonstrate that apps diversity yields unproportional radio resource usage with a gap as large as 116 times.