AINTEC 2019

Andra Lutu

Andra's research revolves around measuring, analyzing and improving how mobile operators join mobility and communications towards the common goal of offering subscribers performance and efficiency in highly dynamic scenarios. Wireless and mobile access to the Internet revolutionized the way that people interact and access information. Mobile broadband networks have become the key infrastructure for people to stay connected everywhere they go and while on the move. Indeed, mobile coverage and performance experienced by the end-users are of great importance to many stakeholders, including mobile subscribers, regulators, governments, businesses that provide Internet services and public transport operators. The society’s increased reliance on mobile networks has made provisioning ubiquitous coverage the highest priority target to achieve for mobile network operators before focusing on performance and user quality of experience.

There are certain factors that render the cellular ecosystem complex and obfuscate the relationships between different networks and carriers, including the use of international hubs that enable roaming partnerships or the presence of international carriers that sell connectivity services to vertical industries and connected machines across different countries. In this talk, I will try to shed light onto the structure of the cellular ecosystem and analyze the implications and exploitation of one of its fundamental features: international roaming. “Roam like Home” is the recent initiative (June 2017) 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 and user quality of experience received little examination. Even more, this infrastructure that mobile operators have established over the last 20 years for person-to-person communications is now being re-purposed to support the IoT expansion and M2M communication. Players across different markets -- from health to logistics -- require reliable connectivity and/or mobility around the world without needing to establish commercial relationships with every operator. We use real-world measurements to offer an in-depth characterization of roaming solutions and their implications in terms of performance or QoE for end-users traveling in Europe. We then focus the analysis on characterizing roaming for M2M/IoT communications. By combining the view from an operational M2M platform with that from an operational MNO in the UK, we shed light on the breadth of M2M/IoT platforms and the impact they have on visited MNOs.