Evaluation of protocol treatment in 3G networks

In this work, we present a systematic study of how the traffic of different transport protocols (UDP, TCP and ICMP) is treated, in three operational Swedish 3G networks. This is done by studying the impact that protocol and packet size have on the one-way-delay (OWD) across the networks. We do this using a special method that allows us to calculate the exact OWD, without having to face the usual clock synchronization problems that are normally associated with OWD calculations. From our results we see that all three protocols are treated similarly by all three operators, when we consider packet sizes that are smaller than 250 bytes and larger than 1100 bytes. We also show that larger packet sizes are given preferential treatment, with both smaller median OWD as well as a smaller standard deviation. It is also clear that, ICMP is given a better performance compared to TCP and UDP.