My work in DICE followed three main stages, during which I worked to achieve my research objectives.
In the first stage, I made major contributions towards advancing the state of the art on cellular ecosystem analysis.
I provided a first look at the opaque IP EXchange (IPX) ecosystem, including a first-of-its-kind in-depth analysis of an IPX Provider.
I characterized the IPX Network, which is a private network formed by a small set of ~30 tightly interconnected IPX-Ps.
I shed light on the structure of the IPX Network as well as on the temporal, structural and geographic features of the IPX traffic.
These results are a first step in understanding the IPX Network at its core, key to fully understand the global mobile Internet.
I also measured the implications that current solutions for mobile roaming have on the end-user experience.
I showed that majority of operators deploy home-routed roaming (HR) roaming, where the home MNO routes the end-user traffic back to the home country.
This results in a degradation on the end-user quality of experience of up to 150% in case of intercontinental roaming (for example, a Spanish SIM roaming in the US).
Together with my collaborators, I build a vast dataset for end-user quality of experience in roaming, which we made public here:
https://smartdata.polito.it/measuring-roaming-in-europeinfrastructure-andimplications-(si apre in una nuova finestra)on-users-qoe/.
As part of the second stage, I captured the cellular ecosystem health in three major measurements studies, which I presented in top venues in our community: SIGCOMM (the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Data
Communication, a vital SIG of the ACM) and IMC (the top annual conference focusing on Internet measurement and analysis, sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGMETRICS).
My work quantifies the adoption of roaming by M2M platforms and the impact they have on the underlying visited operators.
I analyzed IoT verticals operating with connectivity via IoT SIMs in roaming, and present the first large-scale study of commercially deployed IoT SIMs for energy meters.
I also present the first characterization of an operational M2M platform, and the first analysis of the associated ecosystem.
Despite the importance of IPX-Ps to support IoT, little was previously known about their operations and performance.
In my work, I shed light on these opaque providers by analyzing a large operational IPX-P with more than 100 PoPs in 40+ countries,
with a particularly strong presence in America and Europe. These results constitute a step towards
advancing the understanding of IPX-Ps at their core, and provide guidelines for their operations and
customer satisfaction.
During early 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread worldwide, forcing many governments to impose strict lockdown measures to tackle the pandemic.
This significantly changed people’s mobility and habits, subsequently impacting how they use telecommunication networks.
As part of my work in this project around the health of the interconnection ecosystem, I investigated this extraordinary situation, and the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on a mobile network from the UK.
I quantified the changes in users’ mobility and investigate how this impacted the cellular network usage and performance.
My analysis spans from the entire UK to specific regions, and geo-demographic area clusters.
In the final stage of the project, I focused on building novel solutions for enabling MNOs to offer truly native global service to their roaming end-users.
I focused both on improving the health of the IPX system by building tailored solutions for anomaly detection, and on tackling
the inefficiency of roaming solution via innovations on top of the 5G architecture.
