Experience: Implications of Roaming in Europe
Abstract: “Roam like Home” is the initiative of the European Commission (EC) to end the levy of extra charges when roaming within the European region. As a result, people are able to use data services more freely across Europe. However, the implications roaming solutions have on performance have not been carefully examined. 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 six countries across Europe. Using this platform, we measure different aspects of international roaming in 3G and 4G networks, including mobile network configuration, performance characteristics, and content discrimination. We find that operators adopt common approaches to implementing roaming, resulting in additional latency penalties of ∼60 ms or more, depending on geographical distance. Considering content accessibility, roaming poses additional constraints that leads to only minimal deviations when accessing content in the original country. However, geographical restrictions in the visited country make the picture more complicated and less intuitive.
Paper available here
Anna Maria Mandalari (University Carlos III of Madrid); Andra Lutu (Telefonica Research, Simula Research Laboratory); Ana Custura (University of Aberdeen); Ali Safari (Politecnico di Torino); Ozgu Alay (Simula Research Laboratory); Marcelo Bagnulo (University Carlos III of Madrid); Vaibhav Bajpai (Technische Universität München); Anna Brunstrom (Karlstad Universitet); Joerg Ott (Technische Universität München); Marco Mellia (Politecnico di Torino); Gorry Fairhurst (University of Aberdeen). MobiCom 2018