MONROE-Nettest: A configurable tool for dissecting speed measurements in mobile broadband networks
Cise Midoglu, Leonhard Wimmer, Andra Lutu, Özgü Alay, Carsten Griwodz · 2018
As the demand for mobile connectivity continues to grow, the need to evaluate the performance of Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks becomes stronger. In the last years, mobile “speed”, quantified most commonly by data rate, gained popularity as the most widely accepted metric to describe MBB performance. However, there is a lack of consensus on how mobile speed should be measured. In this paper, we design and implement MONROE-Nettest to dissect mobile speed measurements, and investigate the effect of different factors on speed measurements in the complex mobile ecosystem. MONROE-Nettest is built as an Experiment as a Service (EaaS) on top of the MONROE platform, an open dedicated platform for experimentation in operational MBB networks. Using MONROE-Nettest, we conduct a large scale measurement campaign and quantify the effects of measurement duration, number of TCP flows, and server location on measured downlink data rate in 6 operational MBB networks in Europe. Our results indicate that differences in parameter configuration can significantly affect measurement results. We provide the complete MONROE-Nettest software and our measurements as open data.