A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements

Yang Li; Hao Lin; Zhenhua Li; Yunhao Liu; Feng Qian; Liangyi Gong; Xianlong Xin; Tianyin Xu

doi:10.1145/3452296.3472908

A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements

Yang Li, Hao Lin, Zhenhua Li, Yunhao Liu, Feng Qian, Liangyi Gong, Xianlong Xin, Tianyin Xu

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

With recent advances on cellular technologies (such as 5G) that push the boundary of cellular performance, cellular reliability has become a key concern of cellular technology adoption and deployment. However, this fundamental concern has never been addressed due to the challenges of measuring cellular reliability on mobile devices and the cost of conducting large-scale measurements. This paper closes the knowledge gap by presenting the first large-scale, in-depth study on cellular reliability with more than 70 million Android phones across 34 different hardware models. Our study identifies the critical factors that affect cellular reliability and clears up misleading intuitions indicated by common wisdom. In particular, our study pinpoints that software reliability defects are among the main root causes of cellular data connection failures. Our work provides actionable insights for improving cellular reliability at scale. More importantly, we have built on our insights to develop enhancements that effectively address cellular reliability issues with remarkable real-world impact - -our optimizations on Android's cellular implementations have effectively reduced 40% cellular connection failures for 5G phones and 36% failure duration across all phones.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages	597-609
Number of pages	13
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450383837
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472908
State	Published - Aug 9 2021
Event	2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States Duration: Aug 23 2021 → Aug 27 2021

Publication series

Name	SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

Conference

Conference	2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021
Country/Territory	United States
City	Virtual, Online
Period	8/23/21 → 8/27/21

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We appreciate Wenli Shi, Junjie Hou, Rongyan Sun and Daliang Sun for their help in data collection and analysis. We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and our shepherd Lili Qiu for guiding us through the revision process. This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under grant 2018YFB1004700, as well as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 61822205, 61632020, 61632013 and 61902211.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.

Keywords

5G network
cellular connection management
cellular network
mobile operating system
reliability measurement

Access

10.1145/3452296.3472908

OpenUrl availability

Full text

Cite this

Li, Y., Lin, H., Li, Z., Liu, Y., Qian, F., Gong, L., Xin, X., & Xu, T. (2021). A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements. In SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference (pp. 597-609). (SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472908

A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements. / Li, Yang; Lin, Hao; Li, Zhenhua et al.
SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2021. p. 597-609 (SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Li, Y, Lin, H, Li, Z, Liu, Y, Qian, F, Gong, L, Xin, X & Xu, T 2021, A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements. in SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference. SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 597-609, 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021, Virtual, Online, United States, 8/23/21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472908

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A nationwide study on cellular reliability: Measurement, analysis, and enhancements

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access

OpenUrl availability

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