CaMCoW

Partner:

Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)

Mobile broadband (MBB) networks have seen dramatic increases in both capacity and uptake. Characterising user-facing network performance, however, can be challenging because it depends on the particular services being accessed by the subscriber. For example, a user accessing YouTube will receive different performance based on the provisioning and network distance between the access network and the nearest YouTube server. This is not simple – it is a product of both the MBB network and YouTube’s interconnection and capacity planning strategies. Little substantive work exists on exploring the behaviour of user-facing services in MBB networks. This deficiency is particularly critical in MBB networks due to their relative dynamism, and less developed (IXP) peering models (compared to wireline infrastructures).

CaMCoW addresses this gap. It has exploited the MONROE testbed to measure the ways in which popular content services (e.g., Google) have approached deploying and interconnecting their infrastructures for access by MBB subscribers. It will measure the deployment of these services and how MBB users are given access to them. We have correlated these deployment strategies with the Quality of Experience users can expect, to inform best practice. Through this, CaMCoW makes contributions to:

1. Explaining how content services are currently provisioned for access by MBB networks;
2. Providing data and analysis to describe the performance of each services and how it relates to their given deployment strategies;
3. Offering recommendations and areas of importance for improving user Quality of Experience when accessing services from MBB networks; and
4. Generating detailed feedback for the MONROE consortium, e.g., bug fixing, improving accessibility for new users, streamlining measurement data collection, techniques for better automation of experiments.