Abstract. The delay experienced by mobile applications in HSPA networks depends to a large extent on highly dynamical global context like, e.g., cell load or algorithms and thresholds governing radio resource scheduling, and on local context like, e.g., user-generated load or load history. These complex uncertainty factors are outside of an applications sphere of influence and result in applications perceiving HSPA link behavior as non-deterministic and non-reproducible.This paper analyzes accurate round-trip and one-way delay measurement results for three public HSPA networks to demonstrate the high degree of network non-determinism which mobile applications are likely to encounter in practice, particularly significant payload-dependence and halved delay on slightly increased user-generated link load. We argue that current HSPA radio link schedulers, relying on instantaneous user load as decision criterion for channel capacity allocation, neglect real-time application requirements. Cross-layer optimization is one solution which enables deterministic scheduler decisions based on application requirements.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.