FLEX-MONROE: A unified platform for experiments under controlled and operational LTE settings

Abstract

This paper presents FLEX-MONROE, a unique platform that facilitates achieving a thorough understanding of LTE networks, one that captures the status of current operational MBB networks and that also enables LTE performance improvements by allowing experimentation in an environment with controllable LTE parameters. Using this platform, we propose to investigate how variations in the LTE network parameters in uence the network characteristics, which, in turn, translate to application performance metrics that represent the end-user experience. We argue that the FLEXMONROE platform is crucial to understand, validate and ultimately improve how current operational MBB networks perform, towards providing guidelines for designing future 5G architectures. Furthermore, understanding the e ects of low-level tweaks in network parameters in the LTE infrastructure on the application performance is critical to provide guidelines on how to improve the application performance in the current but also future MBB networks. © 2017 ACM.