MONROE-Nettest: A Configurable Tool for Dissecting Speed Measurements in Mobile Broadband Networks

As the demand for mobile connectivity continues to grow, there is a strong need to evaluate the performance of Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks. In the last years, mobile "speed", quantified most commonly by data rate, gained popularity as the widely accepted metric to describe their performance. However, there is a lack of consensus on how mobile speed should be measured. In this paper, we design and implement MONROE-Nettest to dissect mobile speed measurements, and investigate the effect of different factors on speed measurements in the complex mobile ecosystem. MONROE-Nettest is built as an Experiment as a Service (EaaS) on top of the MONROE platform, an open dedicated platform for experimentation in operational MBB networks. Using MONROE-Nettest, we conduct a large scale measurement campaign and quantify the effects of measurement duration, number of TCP flows, and server location on measured downlink data rate in 6 operational MBB networks in Europe. Our results indicate that differences in parameter configuration can significantly affect the measurement results. We provide the complete MONROE-Nettest toolset as open source and our measurements as open data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to INFOCOM CNERT Workshop 201

Procompetitive infrastructure sector regulation and diffusion of innovation: The case of broadband networks

The paper assesses the scope for competition inducing infrastructure regulation in furthering the diffusion of innovation. The paper uses data on the adoption of broadband services comprising a global panel of 167 countries. The effects of different regulatory provisions are assessed. The result of this paper allows qualifying different elements of the regulatory debate on the consequences of access requirements, including mandatory unbundling. First, it suggests that interplatform competition is generally not leading to acceleration in broadband diffusion. Second, with respect to intra-platform competition, this has been analyzed at two different levels: full unbundling and retail competition. In the first case the competitor is investing in network infrastructure to be able to induce some degree of service differentiation. With retail competition the scope for service differentiation is much more limited and hence competition is most likely centered on price. While both lead to faster diffusion, the results consistently show that the effect from retail competition is proportionally about twice as strong compared to unbundling. Moreover, the analysis of the time profile of the effects show that this impact on diffusion first increases until the third or fourth year after introduction, but then dissipates away. Also here one can argue that retail differentiation leads to more intense price competition and therefore faster diffusion. Different robustness checks for the results are provided. --Broadband,regulation,innovation,service competition,platform competition,local loop unbundling

Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds, Tools, and Services

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, developer, research, network operator, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring end-to-end mobile network performance to, among other goals, minimize negative impact on application responsiveness. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. arXiv does not format the URL references correctly. For a correctly formatted version of this paper go to http://www.cs.montana.edu/mwittie/publications/Goel14Survey.pd

An Open Dataset of Operational Mobile Networks

Mobile networks have become ubiquitous and the primary meansto access the Internet, and the traffic they generate has rapidlyincreased over the last years. The technology and service diversityin mobile networks call for extensive and accurate measurementsto ensure the proper functioning of the networks and rapidly spotimpairments. However, the measurement of mobile networks iscomplicated by their scale, and, thus, expensive, especially due tothe diversity of deployments, technologies, and web services. Inthis paper, we present and provide access to the largest open in-ternational mobile network dataset collected using the MONROEplatform spanning six countries, 27 mobile network operators, and120 measurement nodes. We use them to run measurements tar-geting several web services from January 2018 to December 2019,collecting millions of TCP and UDP flows using these commercialmobile networks. We illustrate the data collection platforms and de-scribe some of the main experiments. Besides a high-level overviewof the dataset, we provide two practical use cases. First, we showhow our data can be used as a proxy for web service performance.Second, we study the content delivery infrastructure of Facebook

Experimentation and Characterization of Mobile Broadband Networks

The Internet has brought substantial changes to our life as the main tool to access a large variety of services and applications. Internet distributed nature and technological improvements lead to new challenges for researchers, service providers, and network administrators. Internet traffic measurement and analysis is one of the most trivial and powerful tools to study such a complex environment from different aspects. Mobile BroadBand (MBB) networks have become one of the main means to access the Internet. MBB networks are evolving at a rapid pace with technology enhancements that promise drastic improvements in capacity, connectivity, and coverage, i.e., better performance in general. Open experimentation with operational MBB networks in the wild is currently a fundamental requirement of the research community in its endeavor to address the need for innovative solutions for mobile communications. There is a strong need for objective data relating to stability and performance of MBB (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, and soon-to-come 5G) networks and for tools that rigorously and scientifically assess their performance. Thus, measuring end user performance in such an environment is a challenge that calls for large-scale measurements and profound analysis of the collected data. The intertwining of technologies, protocols, and setups makes it even more complicated to design scientifically sound and robust measurement campaigns. In such a complex scenario, the randomness of the wireless access channel coupled with the often unknown operator configurations makes this scenario even more challenging. In this thesis, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform: an open access and flexible hardware-based platform for measurements on operational MBB networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic, and meaningful assessment of the performance and reliability of MBB networks. We detail the challenges we overcame while building and testing the MONROE testbed and argue our design and implementation choices accordingly. Measurements are designed to stress performance of MBB networks at different network layers by proposing scalable experiments and methodologies. We study: (i) Network layer performance, characterizing and possibly estimating the download speed offered by commercial MBB networks; (ii) End users’ Quality of Experience (QoE), specifically targeting the web performance of HTTP1.1/TLS and HTTP2 on various popular web sites; (iii) Implication of roaming in Europe, understanding the roaming ecosystem in Europe after the "Roam like Home" initiative; and (iv) A novel adaptive scheduler family with deadline is proposed for multihomed devices that only require a very coarse knowledge of the wireless bandwidth. Our results comprise different contributions in the scope of each research topic. To put it in a nutshell, we pinpoint the impact of different network configurations that further complicate the picture and hopefully contribute to the debate about performance assessment in MBB networks. The MBB users web performance shows that HTTP1.1/TLS is very similar to HTTP2 in our large-scale measurements. Furthermore, we observe that roaming is well supported for the monitored operators and the operators using the same approach for routing roaming traffic. The proposed adaptive schedulers for content upload in multihomed devices are evaluated in both numerical simulations and real mobile nodes. Simulation results show that the adaptive solutions can effectively leverage the fundamental tradeoff between the upload cost and completion time, despite unpredictable variations in available bandwidth of wireless interfaces. Experiments in the real mobile nodes provided by the MONROE platform confirm the findings

Speedtest-Like Measurements in 3G/4G Networks: The MONROE Experience

Mobile Broadband (MBB) Networks are evolving at a fast pace, with technology enhancements that promise drastic improvements in capacity, connectivity, coverage, i.e., better performance in general. But how to measure the actual performance of a MBB solution? In this paper, we present our experience in running the simplest of the performance test: "speedtest-like" measurements to estimate the download speed offered by actual 3G/4G networks. Despite their simplicity, download speed measurements in MBB networks are much more complex than in wired networks, because of additional factors (e.g., mobility of users, physical impairments, diversity in technology, operator settings, mobile terminals diversity, etc.).,, We exploit the MONROE open platform, with hundreds of multihomed nodes scattered in 4 different countries, and explicitly designed with the goal of providing hardware and software solutions to run large scale experiments in MBB networks. We analyze datasets collected in 4 countries, over 11 operators, from about 50 nodes, for more than 2 months. After designing the experiment and instrumenting both the clients and the servers with active and passive monitoring tools, we dig into collected data, and provide insight to highlight the complexity of running even a simple speedtest. Results show interesting facts, like the occasional presence of NAT, and of Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEP), and pinpoint the impact of different network configurations that further complicate the picture. Our results will hopefully contribute to the debate about performance assessment in MBB networks, and to the definition of much needed benchmarks for performance comparisons of 3G, 4G and soon of 5G networks"

Path Transparency Measurements from the Mobile Edge with PATHspider

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