With the great success of LTE(-A) outdoor, LTE-based small cell technology has become popular and is penetrating indoor enterprise environment, co-existing with WiFi networks, to provide better user experience or Quality-of-Experience (QoE). However, accurate estimation of LTE links is challenging and critical to continue providing QoE for many enterprise applications (e.g., video/audio) and services (network selection). While prior work on LTE link throughput estimation depends mostly on a single factor (e.g., link rate), we argue that it needs to consider more factors to improve the estimation to meet increasing demands on QoE. In this paper, we propose a new metric, called  Pulsar  (Per-user LTE ShAre of Resources), that estimates per flow throughput in LTE networks by leveraging both underlying channel information and application traffic characteristics. Our extensive evaluation study through ns-3 shows that  Pulsar  reduces the estimation error  more than 92% , compared to prior work, in various scenarios, while keeping estimation overhead low.
['Uma Parthavi Moravapalle', 'Shruti Sanadhya', 'Abhinav Parate', 'Kyu-Han Kim']
Pulsar: improving throughput estimation in enterprise LTE small cells