Conference paper Open Access
Insights from Operating an IP Exchange Provider
Lutu, Andra; Perino, Diego; Bagnulo, Marcelo; Bustamante, Fabián E.
IP 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.
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- Publication date:
- August 26, 2021
- DOI:
-
- Grants:
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European Commission:
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DICE - Dynamic Interconnections for the Cellular Ecosystem (841315)
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DAEMON - Network intelligence for aDAptive and sElf-Learning MObile Networks (101017109)
- PIMCITY - PIMCITY: BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION PERSONAL DATA PLATFORMS (871370)
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DICE - Dynamic Interconnections for the Cellular Ecosystem (841315)
- Meeting:
- ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2021 (ACM SIGCOMM'21), Virtual, August 23–27, 2021 (Session Technical Session 12: The Big Picture)
- Related identifiers:
- Published in
- 10.1145/3452296.3472930 (Conference paper)
- Communities:
- License (for files):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International