Revisited: Bandwidth estimation methods for mobile networks

The rapid adoption of mobile phones and growing number of mobile services (like Whatsapp) have created high volume of mobile data traffic. Compared to the traditional voice and SMS services, mobile data is becoming more and more important. Bandwidth is in high demand and is becoming critical for user experiences with mobile contents. Due to a variety of factors (such as admission control policies, signal fading), bandwidth available to a device cannot be directly mapped to the signal strength. This creates a need for bandwidth estimation on mobile phones, similar to the signal strength indicator, to show the estimated bandwidth at the instant. Due to the complexity of bandwidth measurement and/or limitations of earlier generations of mobile phones, there is a small amount of research on bandwidth estimation for mobile phones. This paper revisits a variety of bandwidth estimation methods for wireless and mobile networks, analyses why most of the solutions fail, studies the accuracy limitation of bandwidth estimation in mobile networks, and finds a feasible solution for dynamically estimating bandwidth on mobile phones. We propose GPing-Pair, a low-cost bandwidth approximation for cellular connections that estimates bandwidth on the mobile device without server support. We implemented the proposed method as an application for Android phones.