Paper Info
Title
Measuring Roaming in Europe: Infrastructure and Implications on Users’ QoE
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 can use data services more freely across Europe. However, the implications of roaming solutions on network performance have not been carefully examined yet. 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 4G networks in Europe, including mobile network configuration, performance characteristics, and quality of experience. We find that operators adopt a common approach to implement roaming called Home-routed roaming (HR). This results in additional latency penalties of 60 ms or more, depending on geographical distance. This leads to worse browsing performance, with an increase in the metrics related to Quality of Experience (QoE) of users (Page Load time and Speed Index) in the order of 15-20 percent. We further analyze in isolation the impact of latency on QoE metrics and find that the penalty imposed by HR leads to a degradation on QoE metrics up to 150 percent in case of intercontinental roaming.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TMC.2021.3058787
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Roaming,mobile networks,measurements
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
1536-1233
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
11
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andra Lutu19818.25
Martino Trevisan27816.10
Ali Safari Khatouni3587.68
Anna Maria Mandalari400.34
Ana Custura500.34
Marco Mellia62748204.65
Özgü Alay724730.68
Marcelo Bagnulo800.34
Vaibhav Bajpai900.68
Anna Brunstrom1000.34
Jorg Ott1100.34
Godred Fairhurst1200.34