Cellular Network Traces Towards 5G: Usage, Analysis and Generation

Deployment and demand traces are a crucial tool to study today's LTE systems, as well as their evolution toward 5G. In this paper, we use a set of real-world, crowdsourced traces, coming from the WeFi and OpenSignal apps, to investigate how present-day networks are deployed, and the load they serve. Given this information, we present a way to generate synthetic deployment and demand profiles, retaining the same features of their real-world counterparts. We further discuss a methodology using traces (both real-world and synthetic) to assess (i) to which extent the current deployment is adequate to the current and future demand, and (ii) the effectiveness of the existing strategies to improve network capacity. Applying our methodology to real-world traces, we find that present-day LTE deployments consist of multiple, entangled, medium- to large-sized cells. Furthermore, although today's LTE networks are overprovisioned when compared to the present traffic demand, they will need substantial capacity improvements in order to face the load increase forecasted between now and 2020.