An experimental analysis of differentiated quality of service support for LTE users

Abstract

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are planning to provide better Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for their priority users in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. In order to enable this feature for their infrastructure, MNOs are upgrading their core, transport and radio acces network sites for better-differentiated QoS support. In this paper, based on real-world network test experiments in one site of Turkey, we present how the performance of LTE base stations behaves when higher priority QoS to some LTE users are enabled. In order to evaluate this we compare the throughput performance of priority users with respect to normal LTE users in different scenarios including various frequencies and bandwidth. Our results demonstrate that even though a pre-configured resource allocation can be given to priority users in a commercial setting, real network performance results can differ due to availability of other normal LTE users and differences in obtained QoS Class Identifier (QCI) levels of wireless network's conditions.