Overview

This project investigates the control-plane design and operations of 3G/4G cellular networks. For a given networked system, its control-plane design largely stipulates its reliability, performance, function correctness and security. There is no exception for cellular networks. The control-plane protocols in 3G/4G mobile networks communicate with each other, and provide a rich set of control utilities, such as radio resource control, mobility support, connectivity management, to name a few.

However, the problem of verifying the correctness of control-plane protocols in 3G/4G mobile networks remains largely unaddressed to date. In this project, we seek to design software tools for such protocol verifications, identify the problematic control-plane designs and operations, quantify their real-world impacts, and infer their root causes.

Research Progress

Debugging Control-Plane Protocols via Domain-Specific Protocol Verification (SIGCOMM'14, TON'15)

We have designed and implemented CNetVerifier, a domain-specific model checking tool for control-plane diagnosis in cellular networks. The goal is to uncover design flaws, as well as operational slips. It works through two-phase diagnosis procedures. During the first phase of screening, we follow standards specifications to model each control-plane protocol as finite-state machines, running at the mobile device and the network infrastructure. We further define common usage scenarios by considering factors of mobility, access and traffic demand. Given a set of desirable properties, we can identify candidate instances that violate such properties in the given scenario. During the second phase for (in)validation, such potential instances are further (in)validated at the operational network. It is done via a phone-based validation method we have devised. This way, we are able to circumvent the closed infrastructure via protocol modeling and phone-based experiments.

Our study so far yields new findings on protocol correctness. We discovered two new classes of problematic interactions among signaling protocols: (1) necessary but problematic cooperation, and (2) independent but coupled operations. They also result in user-perceived performance penalties in the form of temporary out of service, long call setup time, stuck in an old network. We further propose new designs via layer extension, domain separation, and cross-system coordination to fix such instances.

Improper Interplays of Control-Plane Operations for Voice Calls and Data Access (MobiCom'13)

In 4G LTE networks, both voice calls and data access are killer network services. As the LTE network migrates towards an all IP based, packet-switched (PS) design by following the Internet paradigm, providing mobile data access is readily achieved. However, offering carrier-grade voice services with guaranteed performance becomes less obvious. The 4G LTE network uses two voice solutions. One is VoLTE, which is based on packet-switched (PS) Internet voice, and the other is CSFB (CS Fallback, which uses the legacy voice solution in 3G networks and switches a 4G user back to 3G to access circuit-switched voice services). In this study, we examine how voice calls via CSFB affect data service in 4G LTE networks. To our surprise, we found that voice calls and data access interfere with each other. On one hand, voice calls may incur throughput drop (up to 83.4%), transmission halt for seconds, lost 4G connectivity, and application aborts for data sessions. One the other hand, users may miss incoming calls upon turning on data access. It turns out that, though the 3G and 4G systems are designed and operated independently, they do interact with each other via the mobile phone, which runs dual protocol stacks. Improper design of protocols lead to unexpected interference that results in deadlocks and loops in the protocol finite-state operations.

Publication

Team Member

• Songwu Lu  (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Chunyi Peng  (Purdue University)
• Yuanjie Li  (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Haotian Deng  (Ohio State University)
• Chi-Yu Li (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Guan-Hua Tu (University of California, Los Angeles)

Research Support