Paper Info
Title
Insights from operating an IP exchange provider
Abstract
ABSTRACTIP Exchange Providers (IPX-Ps) offer to their customers (e.g., mobile or IoT service providers) global data roaming and support for a variety of emerging services. They peer to other IPX-Ps and form the IPX network, which interconnects 800 MNOs worldwide offering their customers access to mobile services in any other country. Despite the importance of IPX-Ps, little is known about their operations and performance. In this paper, we shed light on these opaque providers by analyzing a large IPX-P with more than 100 PoPs in 40+ countries, with a particularly strong presence in America and Europe. Specifically, we characterize the traffic and performance of the main infrastructures of the IPX-P (i.e., 2-3-4G signaling and GTP tunneling), and provide implications for its operation, as well as for the IPX-P's customers. Our analysis is based on statistics we collected during two time periods (i.e., prior and during COVID-19 pandemic) and includes insights on the main service the platform supports (i.e., IoT and data roaming), traffic breakdown and geographical/temporal distribution, communication performance (e.g., tunnel setup time, RTTs). Our results constitute a step towards advancing the understanding of IPX-Ps at their core, and provide guidelines for their operations and customer satisfaction.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3452296.3472930
ACM SIGCOMM
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
IPX Provider, Mobile Networks, International Mobile Roaming, Performance Analysis
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andra Lutu19818.25
Diego Perino274050.54
M. Bagnulo3577.17
Fabián E. Bustamante462.49