Abstract
IP Exchange Providers (IPX-Ps) offer to their customers (e.g., mobile or IoT service providers) global data roaming and support for a variety of emerging services. They peer to other IPX-Ps and form the IPX network, which interconnects 800 MNOs worldwide offering their customers access to mobile services in any other country. Despite the importance of IPX-Ps, little is known about their operations and performance. In this paper, we shed light on these opaque providers by analyzing a large IPX-P with more than 100 PoPs in 40+ countries, with a particularly strong presence in America and Europe. Specifically, we characterize the traffic and performance of the main infrastructures of the IPX-P (i.e., 2-3-4G signaling and GTP tunneling), and provide implications for its operation, as well as for the IPX-P's customers. Our analysis is based on statistics we collected during two time periods (i.e., prior and during COVID-19 pandemic) and includes insights on the main service the platform supports (i.e., IoT and data roaming), traffic breakdown and geographical/temporal distribution, communication performance (e.g., tunnel setup time, RTTs). Our results constitute a step towards advancing the understanding of IPX-Ps at their core, and provide guidelines for their operations and customer satisfaction.
| Original language | English (US) |
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| Title of host publication | SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
| Pages | 718-730 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450383837 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 9 2021 |
| Event | 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States Duration: Aug 23 2021 → Aug 27 2021 |
Publication series
| Name | SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference |
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Conference
| Conference | 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 |
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| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Virtual, Online |
| Period | 8/23/21 → 8/27/21 |
Funding
We thank the SIGCOMM anonymous reviewers, and our shepherd, Z. Morley Mao, for their helpful comments and guidance. We also thank Daniel Hidalgo Pazos (Telefonica Global Solutions) and Carlos Gamboa Bontje (Telefonica Global Solutions) for their invaluable help collecting and analyzing the dataset from the IPX-P system. The work of Andra Lutu was supported by the EC H2020 Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 841315 (DICE). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no.101017109 DAEMON. The work of Marcelo Bagnulo has been partially funded by the EU Project PIMCITY. We thank the SIGCOMM anonymous reviewers, and our shepherd, Z. Morley Mao, for their helpful comments and guidance. We also thank Daniel Hidalgo Pazos (Telefónica Global Solutions) and Carlos Gamboa Bontje (Telefónica Global Solutions) for their invaluable help collecting and analyzing the dataset from the IPX-P system. The work of Andra Lutu was supported by the EC H2020 Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 841315 (DICE). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no.101017109 "DAEMON". The work of Marcelo Bagnulo has been partially funded by the EU Project PIMCITY.
Keywords
- IPX provider
- international mobile roaming
- measurements
- mobile networks
- performance analysis
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Hardware and Architecture
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering