 Toskala and Jussi Reunanen. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. LTE Small Cell Optimization Smartphone Traffic Analysis in LTE Networks This section presents the summary of traffic analysis from a number of leading LTE networks. The section covers data volumes, traffic asymmetry, traffic-related signalling, mobility-related signalling and user connectivity. A more detailed analysis can be found from Reference [1]. 16.2.1 Data Volumes and Asymmetry The data volumes are increasing rapidly in the mobile broadband networks because of more users and because each user consumes more data. The user data consumption growth is driven by new applications, like high definition streaming enabled by the attractive smartphones. The data volumes created by the smartphones are typically 1-3 GB/month in advanced LTE networks during 2014. Laptops can create a lot of traffic even beyond 10 GB/month. Typical data volumes are illustrated in Figure 16.1. Laptop-dominated networks are found in the early phase of LTE deployment where the smartphone penetration is low, or in those markets where the fixed broadband availability is low and Universal Serial Bus (USB) modems are used home connectivity. Data volumes naturally depend also on pricing and data packages. Most of the mobile broadband traffic today is in the downlink direction. The dominant traffic type is streaming which is practically downlink-only traffic. The downlink data volume can be even 10 times more than the uplink data volume. The asymmetry in LTE networks tends to be higher than in 3G networks even if LTE radio can provide clearly higher uplink data rates. Because of heavy asymmetry, solutions for improving the downlink efficiency are required in LTE networks. The typical asymmetry is shown in Figure 16.2. The asymmetry turns out differently in the mass events where the uplink traffic is relatively higher, see Figure 16.3 from a smartphone network. The reason is that many people want to share pictures and videos from the mass events.