Reliability comparisons of mobile network operators: an experimental case study from a crowdsourced dataset

Abstract

It is of great interest for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to know how well their network infrastructureperformance behaves in different geographical regions of their operating country compared to their horizontal competitors.However, traditional network monitoring and measurement methods of network infrastructure use limited numbersof measurement points that are insufficient for detailed analysis and expensive to scale using an internal workforce.On the other hand, the abundance of crowdsourced content can engender various unforeseen opportunities for MNOsto cope with this scaling problem. This paper investigates end-to-end reliability and packet loss (PL) performancecomparisons of MNOs using a previously collected real-world proprietary crowdsourced dataset from a user applicationfor 13 months’ duration in Turkey. More particularly, a unified crowdsourced data-aided statistical MNO comparisonframework is proposed, which consists of data collection and network performance analysis steps. Our results arestatistically supported using confidence interval analysis for the mean difference of PL ratios and reliability levelsof MNOs using unpaired number of observations statistical analysis. The network performance results indicate thatsignificant performance differences in MNOs depending on different regions of the country exist. Moreover, we observethat the overall comparative ordered list of MNOs’ reliability performance does not differ when both PL and latencyrequirements vary.