Cellular Network Performance Aspects of Monitoring End-to-End User Experience

Mobile terminals during typical operation have inherent access to a variety of network and application performance related data. Within IST-MOTIVE project, our objective is to implement terminal applications that collect and upload such data to performance monitoring servers for further processing. The end-to-end user experience can be thus evaluated by the network operator and possible network upgrades to improve low QoS as experienced by the users, may be easily identified. However, uploading terminal measurements is not a trivial issue; subject to the number of MOTIVE enabled terminals and hence the volume of generated data, it may degrade network performance of voice calls or other packet data sessions. In this paper we present simulation results when enabling the monitoring functionality in case of terminals attached to a GSM/GPRS network. Typical cell configurations were selected and we simulated a variety of different scenarios with respect to voice and packet data traffic.