Scrutinizing Real-life Configurations of Random Access Procedures in Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes real-world cellular network configurations for random access procedures, revealing misalignments with deployment scenarios and demonstrating that optimized configurations can significantly reduce collisions and delays.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of cellular random access configurations and shows how simple adjustments can enhance network performance.

Findings

Configurations often do not match deployment scenarios.

Neighboring cells frequently use identical configurations.

Optimized configurations can reduce collisions by up to 61% and delays by up to 42%.

Abstract

In cellular networks, base stations broadcast configurations that devices use for the random access procedure, which is a vital part of the connection setup. Ideally, the network should choose configurations based on the deployment scenario to optimize radio resource management. Doing so can, for example, decrease collisions of random access messages. We captured 112,806 data points of cellular broadcast information from nine network operators across three countries and analyzed how the operators configure the random access procedure. We found that configurations often do not fit the deployment scenario, and neighboring cells often use the same configuration, causing an unnecessarily high risk of collisions and, hence, delay in the connection setup. Furthermore, we simulated the random access procedure in NS-3 and found that by varying the configurations in a large area with many cells, the number of collisions can be reduced by 43% on average and up to 61%, and the connection delay can be lowered by 11% on average and up to 42%. Our findings indicate that simple adaptations in the random access configurations can greatly improve the performance of cellular networks.