Understanding 5g performance for real-world services: A content providers perspective

Xinjie Yuan, Mingzhou Wu, Zhi Wang, Yifei Zhu, Ming Ma, Junjian Guo, Zhi Li Zhang, Wenwu Zhu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

5G has seen rapid growth recently, attracting several measurement studies on its coverage, connectivity and quality of service. However, there is still a lack of understanding of 5G's capabilities and potential impacts from a content provider (CP)'s perspective. This paper fills in this gap by studying 5G networks used by over 23 million users in one year in Kuaishou, a popular crowdsourced live streaming platform. Our measurements provide the following discoveries. i) Standalone (SA) 5G generally provides end-To-end performance improvement as compared with 4G or non-SA (NSA) 5G, but its advantage depends on both the number of cellular users and CP-level configurations. ii) In the radio access network, SA 5G is more sensitive to access density but has better handover tolerance. iii) Controlled experiments with 29 mobile device models on energy consumption refute some "conventional wisdom,"including that 5G always consumes more power. iv) Traceroute-based active experiments in over 300 cities show that although users are "closer"to the internet in SA 5G, their end-To-end latency may not benefit from that. Furthermore, we show new design space for 5G participants and provide a 5G-Aware rebuffer strategy tested by 9 million viewers in Kuaishou, with a 7% reduction in rebuffer proportion.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages101-113
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394208
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 22 2022
Event2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: Aug 22 2022Aug 26 2022

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period8/22/228/26/22

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank Kuaishou for sponsoring the research and are grateful for the help from our colleagues in Kuaishou, Bing Yu, Yuting Xia, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhenqing Zhang, Jingjing Wang, Yifan Ye, Qian Wu and others. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The brainstorming with Yuling Zhang, Chen Tang and Shuzhao Xie in our laboratory is also appreciated. This work is supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2020AAA0106300), NSFC (Grant No. 61872215), and Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (Grant No. RCYX20200714114523079).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.

Keywords

  • 5G
  • SA 5G
  • content provider
  • core network
  • crowdsourced live streaming
  • end-To-end performance
  • radio access network

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