Efficient transmission of periodic data that follows a consistent daily pattern: experimental study of transmitting performance data in a wireless network

Abstract

Performance management is an essential part of network management. Part of the performance management application is the task of monitoring network resources and periodically transmitting the performance statistics from all the managed nodes in the network to the Operation and Management Centre (OMC). In this paper, we will show that most of the daily performance data of a node within a wireless network follows a consistent pattern with minor changes from one day to the next. Using this behaviour, we introduce an algorithm that would reduce the amount of data transmitted daily by 52% with no loss of information and by 58% with a 10% threshold on information loss. Furthermore, we introduce an extension to the algorithm where both the transmitter and the receiver make a distinction between the behaviour of weekdays and weekends. Our work has been applied to a commercially deployed wireless network.