Preliminary CDPD Performance Testing Results

Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) is a new standard, adopted by a consortium of the major United States cellular telephone companies, for data communication with wireless mobile hosts. CDPD is designed to carry data packets using using either IP or CLNP over the current cellular telephone network, utilizing the available idle capacity of the network not used by voice calls. Although much has been written about the promise of CDPD, little experience exists with connecting real mobile applications using CDPD. This report describes the current state of CDPD and discusses its performance based on actual measurements of the system currently deployed in Pittsburgh. The performance measurements presented here represent data collected over a mostly continuous period spanning over 3 weeks.