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Fast Dormancy Smart Lab White Paper - Nokia PDF
Fast Dormancy Smart Lab White Paper - Nokia PDF
Understanding Smartphone
Behavior in the Network
White Paper
1. Smart Lab Introduction
The massive takeup of smartphones It is for this precise purpose that Nokia
Contents that has occurred since 2007 has been Siemens Networks has established
a boon for the telecommunications multiple Smart Labs worldwide. The
1. Smart Lab Introduction 02
industry. The services, applications, labs in Dallas, US, Espoo, Finland, and
2. Background 03 and connectivity that the industry most recently opened in Seoul, Korea,
provides is something that consumers help find the ideal configurations of
2.1 Smartphone success 03
talk, blog, and tweet about with mobile handsets, applications and
2.2 The smartphone challenge 04 passion. networks to minimize negative network
impact from smart devices, improve
3. Fast Dormancy and its 05
However, this boom in smartphones resource consumption as well as better
consequences has ended up posing a challenge to handset and application performance,
3.1 Nokia Siemens Networks 06 network operators. Because the first and to ultimately provide the best
and Cell_PCH major use of high-speed data was possible user experience.
laptops with dongles gulping down
3.2 Network Controlled Fast 07
gigabytes of P2P applications and Ultimately, it is only when all of the
Dormancy streamed video, operators worldwide players in the value chain understand
4. The smartphone industry 08 focused on efficient delivery of data the effect that they have on all of the
addresses the issue capacity as their top priority. But other players will we be able to develop
smartphones are different. The the ideal win-win-win-win scenario
4.1 Nokia 08
average smartphone consumes only among network operators, handset
4.2 Qualcomm 08 10% of the data traffic that a laptop vendors, application developers, and
does, but smartphones, largely driven consumers. Through its research,
4.3 Apple 08
by the applications that consumers Nokia Siemens Networks Smart
5. What’s next in smartphone 09 love, can connect to the network in Labs are deepening and sharing this
management – the Nokia the background hundreds or even understanding of how we all work best
thousands of times daily, pushing together, so that getting to a fully
Siemens Networks solution
signaling traffic higher than network smartphone-friendly ecosystem isn’t
6. Nokia Siemens Networks 09 planners ever imagined. just the result of trial and error, but is
Smart Labs based on a industry-wide knowledge of
Today’s data network focus is therefore the issues and their effects on all the
7. Recommendations for the 11
widening to include not just data- players.
mobile industry hungry laptops, but connection-hungry
7.1
Application Developers and 11 smartphones as well. The task before
Device Manufacturers us all as an industry is to understand
how handsets, their batteries,
7.2 Operators 11
networks, and applications work
8. Conclusion 12 together, to determine the proper
performance balance for each so that
both end user experience and network
efficiency can be optimized.
Smart Lab Test Result: The story is different when we look The implications of the test are clear.
Mobile Networked Gaming at the signaling traffic. The laptop As interaction-heavy applications such
generated 188 signaling messages as online gaming gain in popularity,
during the half hour, while the operators with significant numbers of
We tested a popular online multiplayer
smartphone generated more than smartphone customers must prepare
poker game and measured the data
10 times that amount, at a staggering for further increases in their signaling
and mobile network signaling traffic
1996 signals during the half hour. This traffic and dimension their networks
generated by playing the game for
is 66 signals per minute, or an average accordingly.
30 minutes on both a laptop and a
of one signal per second.
smartphone, in this case the iPhone
version 4.1. We also measured
baseline activity on the iPhone with Amount of mobile network signaling and data traffic generated
weather and email applications running by playing online poker for 30 minutes
in the background, also for 30 minutes. 3.5 2100
2.8 MB
Data traffic in MB
3.1 Nokia Siemens networks. Part of the 3GPP standard connection times. Waiting for
Networks and Cell_PCH but only widely used commercially by 30 signals to be sent means that
Nokia Siemens Networks, the use of establishing each new data connection
While handset manufacturers were Cell_PCH was originally designed to can take up to two seconds. But
dealing with the battery life challenges reduce data connection set-up time. waiting for 12 signals to be sent only
brought by smartphones, network When a handset is returned to the Idle requires half a second. The result
operators were discovering that in their state after making a data connection, is a clear gain in improved end-user
networks that had been optimized for the entire round trip from Idle to Active experience through shorter wait
laptops, smartphones were generating and back to Idle requires 30 signaling periods when each new data
increasingly unmanageable signaling messages. But when a handset is connection is made. Nokia Siemens
loads. maintained not in the Idle state, but Networks began implementing Cell_
in the Cell_PCH mode between PCH in commercial networks from the
To solve this problem, Nokia Siemens active connections, it only requires very beginning of the 3G era in order to
Networks began recommending use of 12 signaling messages for the round deliver precisely this better user
the paging channel, or Cell_PCH, in its trip. The advantage? Much shorter experience.
Smart Lab Test Result: sending more keep-alive messages thousands of dollars, but pumps up
until the firewall reestablishes the the signal volume in the network,
Signaling and Firewall TCP connection. Then, after another 10 potentially causing much greater
timeout settings minutes of inactivity, the firewall spends to deal with RNC capacity
terminates the connection, and the issues. This illustrates the importance of
Several operators have reported to cycle starts all over again. This greatly understanding smartphones and their
us that they have seen an increase magnifies the network effort needed to effects not just in the radio network,
in signaling traffic when the TCP support keep-alive messages. but right across the enterprise, so that
connection timeout period has been operators can balance, in this example,
reduced in their firewalls between the We at Nokia Siemens Networks have firewall optimization on the one hand
network and the open internet. They found that in the real world, some with network optimization on the other.
asked us to look into this. operators have TCP timeout settings
that are as short as two minutes. This Nokia Siemens Networks recommends
The results clearly show that signaling helps reduce the needed database a firewall TCP connection timeout
does increase when TCP connection capacity of the firewall, saving some setting of 35 minutes or more.
timeout settings are shortened. On
average, we found that a setting of Amount of signaling in one hour
five minutes generated 74% more
signaling traffic overall than a setting of 1600
60 minutes. 1400
Skype on iPhone,
What is happening is that when 1200 push enabled
the firewall timeout is set to a short 1000
Skype on iPhone,
duration, it’s actually shorter than the 800 push disabled
duration of the keep-alive messages
sent by some of the handset 600 Facebook on
applications. So if, say, Skype sends a 400 iPhone, push
keep-alive message every 15 minutes, enabled
200
but the firewall times out and breaks
the internet connection after only 10 0
minutes, the next keep-alive message 60 minutes 10 minutes 5 minutes
will fail because the connection to the
internet is gone. So Skype will keep Firewall TCP connection timeout settings