Reliability comparisons of mobile network operators: an experimental case study from a crowdsourced dataset

Authors: ENGİN ZEYDAN, AHMET YILDIRIM

Abstract: It is of great interest for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to know how well their network infrastructure performance behaves in different geographical regions of their operating country compared to their horizontal competitors. However, traditional network monitoring and measurement methods of network infrastructure use limited numbers of measurement points that are insufficient for detailed analysis and expensive to scale using an internal workforce. On the other hand, the abundance of crowdsourced content can engender various unforeseen opportunities for MNOs to cope with this scaling problem. This paper investigates end-to-end reliability and packet loss (PL) performance comparisons of MNOs using a previously collected real-world proprietary crowdsourced dataset from a user application for 13 months' duration in Turkey. More particularly, a unified crowdsourced data-aided statistical MNO comparison framework is proposed, which consists of data collection and network performance analysis steps. Our results are statistically supported using confidence interval analysis for the mean difference of PL ratios and reliability levels of MNOs using unpaired number of observations statistical analysis. The network performance results indicate that significant performance differences in MNOs depending on different regions of the country exist. Moreover, we observe that the overall comparative ordered list of MNOs' reliability performance does not differ when both PL and latency requirements vary.

Keywords: Data analytics, MNOs, statistics, reliability, KPIs

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