End-to-end user perceived application performance in 3G+ networks

We address application-level performance issues in terms of wireless technologies evolution from 3G-1X RTT to 3G-1X EV and transport technology evolution from ATM to IP. We compared the end-to-end voice packet delay for different vocoder schemes such as G.711, G.726 (PCM), G.726 (ADPCM), and vocoder bypass scheme. We found that the vocoder bypass scenario shows 30% performance improvement over the others. For data packet performance, we found that HTTP v.1.1 shows better performance than that of HTTP v.1.0 due to the pipelining and TCP persistent connection. We also found that IP transport technology is better solution for higher FER environment since the IP packet overhead is smaller than that of ATM for Web browsing data traffic, while it shows opposite effect to small size voice packet in RAN architecture. Through simulation results we showed that the 3G-1X EV system gives much better packet delay performance than 3G-1X RTT. The main conclusion is that end- to-end application-level performance is affected by various elements and layers of the network and thus it must be considered in all phases of the development process.