Title
Investigating Transparent Web Proxies In Cellular Networks
Abstract
People increasingly use mobile devices as their primary means to access the Internet. While it is well known that cellular network operators employ middleboxes, the details of their behavior and their impact on Web performance are poorly understood. This paper presents an analysis of proxy behavior and how transparent Web proxies interact with HTTP traffic in four major US cell carriers. We find that all four carriers use these proxies to interpose on HTTP traffic, but they vary in terms of whether they perform object caching, traffic redirection, image compression, and connection reuse. For example, some transparent proxies unilaterally lower the quality of images, which improves object fetch time but may hurt user satisfaction. We also find that these proxies do not necessarily enhance performance for mobile Web workloads in terms of object fetch times; namely, we observe noticeable benefits only when flow sizes are large and the path between the server and proxy exhibits large latency and/or loss.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_20
PASSIVE AND ACTIVE MEASUREMENT (PAM 2015)
Field
DocType
Volume
Proxy (climate),Web performance,Computer science,Reuse,Computer network,Fetch,Mobile device,Cellular network,Mobile Web,The Internet
Conference
8995
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
33
1.34
References 
Authors
20
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xing Xu1867.35
Yurong Jiang212611.36
Tobias Flach31528.30
Ethan Katz-Bassett4115562.80
David R. Choffnes5134292.81
ramesh govindan6154302144.86