arXiv subjects

Andra Lutu

Publications and source records attributed to Andra Lutu.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

A first look at the IP eXchange Ecosystem

The IPX Network interconnects about 800 Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) worldwide and a range of other service providers (such as cloud and content providers). It forms the core that enables global data roaming while supporting emerging applications, from VoLTE and video streaming to IoT verticals. This paper presents the first characterization of this, so-far opaque, IPX ecosystem and a first-of-its-kind in-depth analysis of ann IPX Provider (IPX-P). The IPX Network is a private network formed by a small set of tightly interconnected IPX-Ps. We analyze an operational dataset from a large IPX-P that includes BGP data as well as statistics from signaling. We shed light on the structure of the IPX Network as well as on the temporal, structural and geographic features of the IPX traffic. Our results are a first step in understanding the IPX Network at its core, key to fully understand the global mobile Internet.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

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.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Tracking the Big NAT across Europe and the U.S

Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) mechanisms enable ISPs to share a single IPv4 address across multiple customers, thus offering an immediate solution to the IPv4 address scarcity problem. In this paper, we perform a large scale active measurement campaign to detect CGNs in fixed broadband networks using NAT Revelio, a tool we have developed and validated. Revelio enables us to actively determine from within residential networks the type of upstream network address translation, namely NAT at the home gateway (customer-grade NAT) or NAT in the ISP (Carrier Grade NAT). We demonstrate the generality of the methodology by deploying Revelio in the FCC Measuring Broadband America testbed operated by SamKnows and also in the RIPE Atlas testbed. We enhance Revelio to actively discover from within any home network the type of upstream NAT configuration (i.e., simple home NAT or Carrier Grade NAT). We ran an active large-scale measurement study of CGN usage from 5,121 measurement vantage points within over 60 different ISPs operating in Europe and the United States. We found that 10% of the ISPs we tested have some form of CGN deployment. We validate our results with four ISPs at the IP level and, reported to the ground truth we collected, we conclude that Revelio was 100% accurate in determining the upstream NAT configuration for all the corresponding lines. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest active measurement study of (confirmed) CGN deployments at the IP level in fixed broadband networks to date.

cs.NI↗