@inproceedings{ye2024dissecting,
author = {Ye, Wei and Hu, Xinyue and Sleder, Steven and Zhang, Anlan and Dayalan, Udhaya Kumar and Hassan, Ahmad and Fezeu, Rostand A. K. and Jajoo, Akshay and Lee, Myungjin and Ramadan, Eman and Qian, Feng and Zhang, Zhi-Li},
title = {Dissecting Carrier Aggregation in 5G Networks: Measurement, QoE Implications and Prediction},
year = {2024},
isbn = {9798400706141},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3651890.3672250},
doi = {10.1145/3651890.3672250},
abstract = {By aggregating multiple channels, Carrier Aggregation (CA) is an important technology for boosting cellular network bandwidth. Given diverse radio bands made available in 5G networks, CA plays a particularly critical role in achieving the goal of multi-Gbps throughput performance. In this paper, we carry out a timely comprehensive measurement study of CA  in commercial 5G networks (as well as 4G networks). We identify the key factors that influence whether CA is deployed and when, as well as which band combinations are used. Thus, we reveal the challenges posed by CA in 5G performance analysis and prediction as well as their implications in application quality-of-experience (QoE). We argue for and develop a novel CA-aware deep learning framework, dubbed Prism5G, which explicitly accounts for the complexity introduced by CA to more effectively predict 5G network throughput performance. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of Prism5G over existing throughput prediction algorithms. Prism5G improves 5G throughput prediction accuracy by over 14\% on average and a maximum of 22\%. Using two use cases as examples, we further illustrate how Prism5G can aid applications in optimizing QoE performance.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference},
pages = {340–357},
numpages = {18},
keywords = {carrier aggregation, 4G, 5G, network measurement, mobile network throughput prediction, deep learning},
location = {Sydney, NSW, Australia},
series = {ACM SIGCOMM '24}
}