User data traffic analysis for 3G cellular networks

In this paper, an analysis of 3G network user data traffic is presented. With the increasing demands for high data rate and energy-efficient cellular service, it is important to understand how cellular user data traffic changes over time and in space. We provide statistical modelling of time-varying throughput per cell and the distribution of instantaneous throughput per cell over different cells based on throughput measurements from a real-world large-scale urban cellular network. Based on our inspection of the large set of cellular data traffic measurements, user data traffics on weekday and weekend are analyzed separately. Our proposed statistical models can generate network traffic data that are very close to the measured traffic and can be used in simulations of large-scale urban-area mobile networks.