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Experience: Implications of Roaming in Europe

Published: 15 October 2018 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiCom '18: Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
October 2018
884 pages
ISBN:9781450359030
DOI:10.1145/3241539
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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Publication History

Published: 15 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. experimental testbeds
  2. measurement platform
  3. measurements
  4. mobile networks
  5. roaming

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  • Research-article

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  • Bayrisches Wissenschaftsforum
  • European Union H2020-ICT
  • European Union H2020

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MobiCom '18
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MobiCom '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 187 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

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  • (2024)Unveiling the 5G Mid-Band Landscape: From Network Deployment to Performance and Application QoEProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672269(358-372)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • (2024)dAuth: A Resilient Authentication Architecture for Federated Private Cellular NetworksProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672263(373-391)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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  • (2022)A Survey on Remote Operation of Road VehiclesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.322916810(130135-130154)Online publication date: 2022
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