Understanding the super-sized traffic of the super bowl

Large events like the Super Bowl, where almost 75K attendees congegrate for several hours, poses a significant challenge in the planning, design and deployment of wireless networks. This was one of the first events where the LTE cellular network was available widely, in addition to almost 700 WiFi free hotspots. The Super Bowl in 2013 was also unprecedented because of a stadium-wide power outage for over half an hour. This study is the first to look in-depth at the user behaviours and traffic demand of a large ISP's celluar network at such an unique event. The findings of this study can be used to guide the design of the communication networks of large venues in the future. There are several key insights from our study of the data collected. First, LTE speeds enable subscribers at venues to stream high-quality video and this can be a signficant source of traffic. Second, the configuration of the uplink for such events is key, and a thoughtful approach to the design of applications that use the cloud for storing user data can substantially mitigate the congestion on the resource constrained uplink. Further, while it is tempting to take advantage of multicast on the cellular network (e.g., deploying technologies such as eMBMS in a venue), our results indicate that there is a need to combine multicast with caching to remove the strict requirement of overlap of requests from users to derive that benefit.