TY - GEN
T1 - Different Policies for Different NodeBs
T2 - 27th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2026
AU - Zhang, Zesen
AU - Larrea, Jon
AU - Huddleston, Jarrett
AU - Wan, Haoran
AU - Mok, Ricky K.P.
AU - Huffaker, Bradley
AU - Claffy, K. C.
AU - Jamieson, Kyle
AU - Marder, Alexander
AU - Schulman, Aaron
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Cellular base stations rely on proprietary downlink scheduling algorithms that vendors independently develop to fairly and efficiently schedules traffic to competing users. Schedulers from different vendors can make different scheduling decisions depending on channel conditions, buffer status, fairness, and capability. This work is the first to show the significant scheduling policy differences in a head-to-head comparison of the behavior of downlink schedulers across four base station vendors (Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia and Huawei) running on four cellular providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Vodafone). The evaluation is based on 500Gbytes of downlink transfers across 20 base stations in five cities during semi-controlled network and signal conditions. In particular, we observe different strategies for allocating radio resources, for rate control, and for handling users with asymmetric channel quality. These results challenge the assumptions made about downlink scheduler uniformity in prior cellular performance measurement studies.
AB - Cellular base stations rely on proprietary downlink scheduling algorithms that vendors independently develop to fairly and efficiently schedules traffic to competing users. Schedulers from different vendors can make different scheduling decisions depending on channel conditions, buffer status, fairness, and capability. This work is the first to show the significant scheduling policy differences in a head-to-head comparison of the behavior of downlink schedulers across four base station vendors (Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia and Huawei) running on four cellular providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Vodafone). The evaluation is based on 500Gbytes of downlink transfers across 20 base stations in five cities during semi-controlled network and signal conditions. In particular, we observe different strategies for allocating radio resources, for rate control, and for handling users with asymmetric channel quality. These results challenge the assumptions made about downlink scheduler uniformity in prior cellular performance measurement studies.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105035351581
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105035351581#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-032-18268-5_11
DO - 10.1007/978-3-032-18268-5_11
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783032182678
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 231
EP - 246
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 27th International Conference, PAM 2026, Proceedings
A2 - Ferlin-Reiter, Simone
A2 - Fontugne, Romain
A2 - Ullrich, Johanna
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 23 March 2026 through 25 March 2026
ER -