A passive measurement tool for monitoring wireless packet network performances

Continuous monitoring of performances becomes necessary to detect critical situations in the radio interface of digital wireless telephone networks. This paper presents a measurement tool that analyzes TCP-level packet traffic and detects the effects of variations in the radio channel conditions of a mobile network. The analysis algorithm considers the energies of wavelet coefficients of the aggregated traffic process at a suitably selected number of time scales. Wavelet energy variations are detected by a statistical test from which a score is calculated. This indicator reveals changes in the performances of the monitored network.