Measurement and analysis of UDP and TCP traffic over commercial WiBro network

Abstract

WiBro (Wireless Broadband Internet), the Korean version of mobile WiMAX compatible standard, provides high-speed mobile data service. Although mobile WiMAX services are being deployed, there exist few reports about WiBro performance. In this work, we measure and analyze performance of WiBro in best-case and live serviced network. We developed a GPS synchronization device to measure one-way delay. The measurement shows that the maximum throughput over the WiBro network is 10 Mbps in downlink and 2.5 Mbps in uplink. We estimate that the base station has large buffers up to 2 s and minimum one-way delay of 11 ms for downlink. To fully exploit the high bandwidth of WiBro, the auto-tuning feature of TCP is needed along with a minimum of 128 KB buffer size. WiBro provide enough bandwidth to serve good quality to applications such as VoIP,Web, Flash Video both stationary and mobile environment. To assure real-time services’ quality like VoIP, WiBro have to minimize the one-way delay generated in congested queue.