Passive measurement tool for monitoring mobile packet network performances

Continuous monitoring of performances is necessary to detect critical situations in the radio interface of digital mobile telephone networks. This paper presents a measurement tool that analyzes Transmission Control-Protocol (TCP) level packet traffic and detects the effects of variations in the radio-channel conditions of a wireless network. The analysis algorithm considers the wavelet coefficients of the aggregated-traffic process at a suitably selected number of time scales. Variations in the energy of wavelet coefficients are detected by a statistical test, from which a score is calculated. This indicator reveals changes in the performances of the monitored network