Utkarsh Goel

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 developers, researchers, network operators, and regulators. 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.

The personal SMS gateway

This application facility to send SMS without the need of a mobile phone and internet. It uses a GSM/GPRS modem and a SIM card to send messages to any mobile network. The cost of the message sent is based on the message tariff subscribed with the SIM card. Further the application is used to send private messages as well as used to broadcast any news content. The application can send, read received, deletes messages stored in the SIM card. The application interacts directly with microcontroller of the modem and uses the sole command used to interact with the network provider of the SIM card. Further the delivery reports of the sent messages are also displayed. The application also counts the total number of messages stored in the SIM card.

A case for faster mobile web in cellular IPv6 networks

The transition to IPv6 cellular networks creates uncertainty for content providers (CPs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) of whether and how to follow suit. Do CPs that update their CDN contracts to allow IPv6 hosting achieve better, or worse performance in mobile networks? Should CDNs continue to host mobile content over IPv4 networks, or persuade to their CP customers the performance benefits of IPv6 content delivery? In this paper we answer these questions through a comprehensive comparison of IPv4 and IPv6 mobile Web performance in cellular networks in the US from the point of view of Akamais content delivery infrastructure. Our data show that IPv6 hosting outperforms legacy IPv4 paths in mobile Web. Our analysis leads to clear recommendations for CPs to transition to IPv6-hosted mobile Web. Finally, we propose new mechanisms, through which CDNs can safely transition mobile content to IPv6-enabled servers for improved content delivery.

Faster Web through Client-Assisted CDN Server Selection

Modern websites use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to speed up the delivery of static content. However, we show that DNS-based selection of CDN servers can be refined to fully deliver on the speedup of CDNs. We propose DNS-Proxy (dp), a client-side process that shares load-balancing functionality with CDNs by choosing from among resolved CDN servers based on last mile network performance. Our measurement study of CDN infrastructure deployed by five major CDN providers shows that dp reduces webpage load time by 29% on average. If dp has already resolved the domain, the reduction in webpage load time is as much as 40%. Finally, dp reduces the load time of individual static Web objects by as much as 43%. We argue that dp enables a more effective use of existing content delivery infrastructure and represents a complementary strategy to a continual increase of geographic content availability.

Detecting Cellular Middleboxes Using Passive Measurement Techniques

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establishes a connection with a server, the connection is only shared by two physical machines, the client and the server. In current cellular networks, a myriad of middleboxes disregard the end-to-end principle to enable network operators to deploy services such as content caching, compression, and protocol optimization to improve end-to-end network performance. If server operators remain unaware of such middleboxes, TCP connections may not be optimized specifically for middleboxes and instead are optimized for mobile devices. We argue that without costly active measurement, it remains challenging for server operators to reliably detect the presence of middleboxes that split TCP connections. In this paper, we present three techniques (based on latency, loss, and characteristics of TCP SYN packets) for server operators to passively identify Connection Terminating Proxies (CTPs) in cellular networks, with the goal to optimize TCP connections for faster content delivery. Using TCP and HTTP logs recorded by Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers, we demonstrate that our passive techniques are as reliable and accurate as active techniques in detecting CTPs deployed in cellular networks worldwide.

HTTP/2 performance in cellular networks: poster

HTTP/2 (h2) was standardized in 2015 as an improvement to HTTP/1.1 (h1) to achieve faster webpage load times (PLTs) [5]. Previous studies have shown both improvement and degradation in PLT when using h2 with respect to h1 [6, 8]. The disagreement about h2 performance from these studies motivates further investigation as to whether and under what conditions h2 brings the performance benefits that were originally envisioned [5].

MITATE: Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation

This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation (MITATE). MITATE is the first programmable testbed to support the prototyping of application communications between mobiles and cloud datacenters. We describe novel solutions to device security and resource sharing behind MITATE. Finally, we show how MITATE can answer network performance questions crucial to mobile application design.

Measuring What is Not Ours: A Tale of 3^{\text {rd}} Party Performance

Content Providers make use of, so called \({\textit{3}}^{{ rd}}~{{ Party}}\) (\({\textit{3P}}\)) services, to attract large user bases to their websites, track user activities and interests, or to serve advertisements. In this paper, we perform an extensive investigation on how much such \({\textit{3Ps}}\) impact the Web performance in mobile and wired last-mile networks. We develop a new Web performance metric, the \(\mathtt{3}^\mathtt{rd}~\mathtt{Party~Trailing~Ratio}\), to represent the fraction of the critical path of the webpage load process that comprises of only \({\textit{3P}}\) downloads. Our results show that \({\textit{3Ps}}\) inflate the webpage load time (PLT) by as much as 50% in the extreme case. Using URL rewriting to redirect the downloads of \({\textit{3P}}\) assets on \({\textit{1}}^{\textit{st}}~{\textit{Party}}\) infrastructure, we demonstrate speedups in PLTs by as much as 25%.

Wilcom: Application for Interacting via Voice, Video and Text at Zero Cost in a Wi-Fi Cloud

Communication has become a part of our daily routine. Wireless devices like mobile phones or portable digital displays (PDAs), Laptops need something other than internet for communication. The paper gives an overview to communicate using Wi-Fi networks, the internet and bypass mobile tariff for such applications.

EMS: The talking mail service

The application brings the facility which every person need in his each phase of life. It has facility of sending electronic mails with Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL user accounts. This client is very similar to the other email clients but it can be used by anyone without the need of configuring differently for different users. It automatically sets its configuration depending upon the account type of the user that is currently logged in. Further this application consists of a feature that fetches user e-mails from the server. The fetching either POP3 or IMAP depends on the type of email server that is used and also on the user account settings. Only one at a time is fetched from the email server so as to avoid flooding of e-mails. It can write down your emails itself and can even read out your incoming messages.