Abstract
"Roam like Home" is the initiative of the European Commission to end the levy of extra charges when roaming within the European region. As a result, people can use data services more freely across Europe. However, the implications of roaming solutions on network performance have not been carefully examined yet. 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 6 countries across Europe. Using this platform, we measure different aspects of international roaming in 4G networks in Europe, including mobile network configuration, performance characteristics, and quality of experience. We find that operators adopt a common approach to implement roaming called Home-routed roaming. This results in additional latency penalties of 60 ms or more, depending on geographical distance. This leads to worse browsing performance, with an increase in the metrics related to Quality of Experience (QoE) of users (Page Load time and Speed Index) in the order of 15-20%. We further analyze the impact of latency on QoE metrics in isolation and find that the penalty imposed by Home Routing leads to degradation on QoE metrics up to 150% in case of intercontinental roaming. We make our dataset public to allow reproducing the results.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3687 - 3699 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 10 |
Early online date | 15 Feb 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2022 |
Bibliographical note
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe research leading to these results has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 644399 (MON ROE) and No. 777137 (5G-RANGE) and by the Smart- Data@PoliTO center for Big Data technologies. The work of Andra Lutu was supported by the EC H2020 Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 841315 (DICE).
Keywords
- Europe
- Home automation
- IP networks
- Mobile computing
- Mobile nodes
- Quality of experience
- Servers