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Accounting for roaming users on mobile data access: issues and root causes

Published: 25 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we study how mobility affects mobile data accounting, which records the usage volume for each roaming user. We find out that, current 2G/3G/4G systems have well-tested mobility support solutions and generally work well. However, under certain biased, less common yet possible scenarios, accounting gap between the operator's log and the user's observation indeed exists. The gap can be as large as 69.6% in our road tests. We further discover that the root causes are diversified. In addition to the no-signal case reported in the prior work [23], they also include handoffs, as well as insufficient coverage of hybrid 2G/3G/4G systems. Inter-system handoffs (that migrate user devices between radio access technologies of 2G, 3G, and 4G) may incur non-negligible accounting discrepancy.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        MobiSys '13: Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
        June 2013
        568 pages
        ISBN:9781450316729
        DOI:10.1145/2462456
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 25 June 2013

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        Author Tags

        1. accounting
        2. cellular networks
        3. charging
        4. mobile data services

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        MobiSys '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 211 submissions, 16%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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        Cited By

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        • (2021)Bookworm Game: Automatic Discovery of LTE Vulnerabilities Through Documentation Analysis2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40001.2021.00104(1197-1214)Online publication date: May-2021
        • (2019)Putting Context in the Network Access of Mobile Applications Using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy ProcessInternational Journal of Decision Support System Technology10.4018/IJDSST.201904010211:2(13-26)Online publication date: Apr-2019
        • (2019)Bridging the data charging gap in the cellular edgeProceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication10.1145/3341302.3342074(15-28)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2019
        • (2018)Device-Customized Multi-Carrier Network Access on Commodity SmartphonesIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2018.286949226:6(2542-2555)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
        • (2017)DroidData: Tracking and Monitoring Data Transmission in the Android Operating SystemCommunications and Network10.4236/cn.2017.9301409:03(192-206)Online publication date: 2017
        • (2017)Towards Automated Intelligence in 5G Systems2017 26th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN.2017.8038472(1-9)Online publication date: Jul-2017
        • (2016)iCellularProceedings of the 13th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/2930611.2930653(643-656)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2016
        • (2016)Detecting problematic control-plane protocol interactions in mobile networksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2015.240433624:2(1209-1222)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
        • (2016)Mobile bandwidth sharing: Pricing analysis under buffet plans2016 18th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS)10.1109/APNOMS.2016.7737276(1-4)Online publication date: Oct-2016
        • (2016)A Context-Based Personalization for Mobile Applications’ Network AccessMobile Web and Intelligent Information Systems10.1007/978-3-319-44215-0_34(406-415)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2016
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