| 1. |
- Alay, Özgü, et al.
(author)
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Experience : An open platform for experimentation with commercial mobile broadband networks
- 2017
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In: MobiCom '17 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. - New York : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450349161 ; , s. 70-78
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Open experimentation with operational Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks in the wild is currently a fundamental requirement of the research community in its endeavor to address the need of innovative solutions for mobile communications. Even more, there is a strong need for objective data about stability and performance of MBB (e.g., 3G/4G) networks, and for tools that rigorously and scientifically assess their status. In this paper, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform: an open access and flexible hardware-based platform for measurements and custom experimentation on operational MBB networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic and meaningful assessment of the performance and reliability of 11 MBB networks in Europe. We report on our experience designing, implementing and testing the solution we propose for the platform. We detail the challenges we overcame while building and testing the MONROE testbed and argue our design and implementation choices accordingly. We describe and exemplify the capabilities of the platform and the wide variety of experiments that external users already perform using the system
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| 2. |
- Alay, Özgü, et al.
(author)
-
Measuring and Assessing Mobile Broadband Networks with MONROE
- 2016
-
In: 2016 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile, and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM). - Red Hook : IEEE. - 9781509021864 - 9781509021857
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Mobile broadband (MBB) networks underpin numerous vital operations of the society and are arguably becoming the most important piece of the communications infrastructure. In this demo paper, our goal is to showcase the potential of a novel multi-homed MBB platform for measuring, monitoring and assessing the performance of MBB services in an objective manner. Our platform, MONROE, is composed of hundreds of nodes scattered over four European countries and a backend system that collects the measurement results. Through a user-friendly web client, the experimenters can schedule and deploy their experiments. The platform further embeds traffic analysis tools for real-time traffic flow analysis and a powerful visualization tool.
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| 3. |
- Alay, Özgü, et al.
(author)
-
MONROE, a distributed platform to measure and assess mobile broadband networks : demo
- 2016
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In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation, and Characterization. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450342520 ; , s. 85-86
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This demo presents the MONROE distributed platform and how it can be used to implement measurement and assessment experiments with operational mobile broadband networks (MBBs). MONROE provides registered experimenters with open access to hundreds of nodes, distributed over several European countries and equipped with multiple MBB connections, and a backend system that collects the measurement results. Experiments are scheduled through a user-friendly web client, with no need to directly access the nodes. The platform further embeds tools for real-time traffic flow analysis and a powerful visualization tool.
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| 4. |
- Khatouni, Ali Safari, et al.
(author)
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Speedtest-like Measurements in 3G/4G Networks : the MONROE Experience
- 2017
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In: 2017 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 29TH INTERNATIONAL TELETRAFFIC CONGRESS (ITC 29), VOL 1. - : IEEE. ; , s. 169-177
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- 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.
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| 5. |
- Mancuso, Vincenzo, et al.
(author)
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Results from running an experiment as a service platform for mobile broadband networks in Europe
- 2019
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In: Computer Communications. - : Elsevier. - 0140-3664 .- 1873-703X. ; 33, s. 89-101
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this article we present a selection from a vast range of experiments run with MONROE, our open experiment as a service (EaaS) platform for measurements and experimentation in Mobile Broadband Networks. We show that the platform can be used to benchmark network performance in a repeatable and controlled manner thanks to the collection of a rich set of geotagged metadata and the execution of discretionary user experiments. Indeed, with the sheer amount of data collected from 12 commercial mobile operators across Europe, MONROE offers an unprecedented opportunity to monitor, analyze and ultimately improve the status of current and future mobile broadband networks. Besides, we show how flexibly the platform allows combining metadata and experimental data series during the experiments or by means of post-processing, and show results produced by our own experiments as well as comment on results obtained by external research groups and developers that have been granted access to our platform.
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| 6. |
- Mandalari, Anna Maria, et al.
(author)
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Experience: Implications of Roaming in Europe
- 2018
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In: MobiCom '18. Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. - New York, USA : ACM Publications. - 9781450359030 ; , s. 179-189
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- "Roam like Home" is the initiative of the European Commission (EC) to end the levy of extra charges when roaming within the European region. As a result, people are able to use data services more freely across Europe. However, the implications roaming solutions have on performance have not been carefully examined. This paper provides an in-depth characterization of the implications of international data roaming within Europe. We build a unique roaming measurement platform using 16 different mobile networks deployed in six countries across Europe. Using this platform, we measure different aspects of international roaming in 3G and 4G networks, including mobile network configuration, performance characteristics, and content discrimination. We find that operators adopt common approaches to implementing roaming, resulting in additional latency penalties of ∼60 ms or more, depending on geographical distance. Considering content accessibility, roaming poses additional constraints that leads to only minimal deviations when accessing content in the original country. However, geographical restrictions in the visited country make the picture more complicated and less intuitive.
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| 7. |
- Peón-Quirós, Miguel, et al.
(author)
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Results from Running an Experiment as a Service Platform for Mobile Networks
- 2017
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In: WiNTECH '17 Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & CHaracterization. - New York, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450351478 ; , s. 9-16
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper we present a selection from a vast range of experiments run with MONROE, our experiment as a service platform open to external researchers. We show that the platform can be used to benchmark network performance in a repeatable and controlled manner thanks to the collection of a rich set of geotagged metadata and the execution of discretionary user experiments. Indeed, with the sheer amount of data collected from 12 commercial mobile operators across Europe, MONROE offers an unprecedented opportunity to monitor, analyze and ultimately improve the status of current and future mobile broadband networks. We also show how flexibly the platform allows combining metadata and experimental data series during the experiments or by means of post-processing, and show results produced by our own experiments as well as by external research groups and developers that have been granted access to the platform
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| 8. |
- Rajiullah, Mohammad, 1981-, et al.
(author)
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Mobile Network Performance during the COVID-19 Outbreak from a Testbed Perspective
- 2020
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- COVID-19 has changed our lives and continues to have a drastic impact. It forces us to impose restrictive social distancing measures and leads us to rely more on the Internet. Mobile networks become one of the major means to access the Internet for most of us. We investigate the performance of 9 mobile networks in Europe around the time when restrictions were imposed, considering web QoE, throughput, RTT, and signal coverage. Our results show countries’ mobile networks are impacted by COVID-19 (as high as 46 % increase in page load time) at different times based on the outbreak timelines in these countries. Moreover, we find that operators responded properly and the network performance is back to the pre-COVID-19 times.
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| 9. |
- Rajiullah, Mohammad, 1981-, et al.
(author)
-
Web Experience in Mobile Networks : Lessons from Two Million Page Visits
- 2019
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Measuring and characterizing web page performance is a challeng- ing task. When it comes to the mobile world, the highly varying technology characteristics coupled with the opaque network con- figuration make it even more difficult. Aiming at reproducibility, we present a large scale empirical study of web page performance collected in eleven commercial mobile networks spanning four countries. By digging into measurement from nearly two million web browsing sessions, we shed light on the impact of different web protocols, browsers, and mobile technologies on the web per- formance. We found that the impact of mobile broadband access is sizeable. For example, the median page load time using mobile broadband increases by a third compared to wired access. Mobility clearly stresses the system, with handover causing the most evi- dent performance penalties. Contrariwise, our measurements show that the adoption of HTTP/2 and QUIC has practically negligible impact. To understand the intertwining of all parameters, we adopt state-of-the-art statistical methods to identify the significance of different factors on the web performance. Our analysis confirms the importance of access technology and mobility context as well as webpage composition and browser. Our work highlights the importance of large-scale measurements. Even with our controlled setup, the complexity of the mobile web ecosystem is challenging to untangle. For this, we are releasing the dataset as open data for validation and further research.
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