Predicting/calculating congestion in telecom network

Question

I have an application installed at my phone which is providing below details every minute: - Bandwidth , -Packet loss ,-signal strength,- RTT for google.com every minute.
I am trying to predict congestion based on these 4 attribute , but some how it doesn't look accurate to me , previously i have only used bandwidth .
I want predict congestion at any point more appropriately , appreciate any recommendations .

Answer 1

I think you are saying you are trying to measure network 'responsiveness', and from these measurements get a sense of how congested the network is. You also mention you want to predict which I guess means you want to make an estimate of the future 'responsiveness' based on your measurements and observations.

The items you are measuring look sensible, although you may want to include jitter if you are interested in VoIP or other real time streamed media.

The issue you have is that there are many variables which can effect your measurements, for example:

• congestion in the radio cell you are in at the time
• congestion in the backhaul network
• delays in the server you are using to measure the RTT
• congestion or faults with the particular APN your mobile is using to access data services
• network faults

As some of these can be irregularly occurring but can have a large impact, it is quite hard to build up an accurate view of the overall network 'responsiveness' with a single handset. For example your local cell may be busy or have a problem but others users of Google.com in other cells will have perfectly good response, or Google.com may be busy or delayed and other users in your cell accessing a different server may again have perfectly good response.

It would likely be useful for you to look at some of the generally available web speedtest applications to see the type of information they provide - they have the advantage of being able to gather results from many thousands of users, and also generally have access to the servers to understand any issues on that side.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve it might be that a combination of measurements from one of the general speedtest services, combined with your own measurements will give you enough data to draw some sort of meaningful conclusions.