CellIQ: Real-Time Cellular Network Analytics at Scale

We present CellIQ, a real-time cellular network analytics system that supports rich and sophisticated analysis tasks. CellIQ is motivated by the lack of support for real-time analytics or advanced tasks such as spatio-temporal traffic hotspots and handoff sequences with performance problems in state-of-the-art systems, and the interest in such tasks by network operators. CellIQ represents cellular network data as a stream of domain specific graphs, each from a batch of data. Leveraging domain specific characteristics—the spatial and temporal locality of cellular network data—CellIQ presents a number of optimizations including geo-partitioning of input data, radius-based message broadcast, and incremental graph updates to support efficient analysis. Using data from a live cellular network and representative analytic tasks, we demonstrate that CellIQ enables fast and efficient cellular network analytics—compared to an implementation without cellular specific operators, CellIQ is 2× to 5× faster.

Authors: Anand Padmanabha Iyer, Li Erran Li, Ion Stoica
Publication Date: May 2015
Conference: USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)