Measurement-Based Analysis of the Performance of the UMTS, Wimax and WiFi technologies

Wireless technologies have rapidly evolved and are becoming ubiquitous. An increasing number of users attach to the Internet using these technologies; hence the performance of these wireless access links is a key point when considering the performance of the whole Internet. In this project we present a measurement-based analysis of the performance of an IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) client and an UMTS client. The measurements were carried out in a controlled laboratory. The wireless access links were loaded with traffic from a multi-point videoconferencing application and we measured three layer-3 metrics (One-Way-Delay, IP-Delay-Variation and Packet Loss Ratio).

Additionally we estimate the performance of a WiFi and Ethernet client as a reference. Our results show that Ethernet and WiFi have comparable performances. Both the WiMAX and the UMTS links exhibited an asymmetric behavior, with the uplink showing an inferior performance. We also assesed the causes of the discretisation which appeares in the jitter distributions of these links.

If you want to have access to the traces evaluated in the article "Measurement-Based Analysis of the Performance of several Wireless Technologies", please contact with: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The traces has been anonymized and packets filtrated to just show the traffic generated by the videoconference application Isabel.  

Please, if you use the traces for your research cite:

R. Cosma, A. Cabellos-Aparicio, J. Domenech-Benlloch, J. Gimenez-Guzman, J. Martinez-Bauset, M. Cristian, A. Fuentetaja, A. López, J. Domingo-Pascual, J. Quemada “Measurement-Based Analysis of the Performance of several Wireless Technologies” in Proc. of IEEE LANMAN 2008 (bibtex) 

In the following table you can see the correspondence between technology and the client IP used in the experiments.

Download traces here.