Detecting if LTE is the Bottleneck with BurstTracker

Abstract

We present BurstTracker, the first tool that developers can use to detect if the LTE downlink is the bottleneck for their applications. BurstTracker is driven by our discovery that the proprietary LTE downlink schedulers running on LTE base stations allocate resources to users in a way that reveals if a user's downlink queue runs empty during a download. We demonstrate that BurstTracker works across Tier-1 cellular providers and across a variety of network conditions. We also present a case study that shows how application developers can use this tool in practice. Surprisingly, with BurstTracker, we find that the LTE downlink may not be the bottleneck for video streaming on several Tier-1 providers, even during peak hours at busy locations. Rather, transparent TCP middleboxes deployed by these providers lead to downlink underutilization, because they force Slow-Start Restart. With a simple workaround, we improve video streaming bitrate on busy LTE links by 35%.