An Open Dataset of Operational Mobile Networks

Abstract

Mobile networks have become ubiquitous and the primary means to access the Internet, and the traffic they generate has rapidly increased over the last years. The technology and service diversity in mobile networks call for extensive and accurate measurements to ensure the proper functioning of the networks and rapidly spot impairments. However, the measurement of mobile networks is complicated by their scale, and, thus, expensive, especially due to the diversity of deployments, technologies, and web services. In this paper, we present and provide access to the largest open international mobile network dataset collected using the MONROE platform spanning six countries, 27 mobile network operators, and 120 measurement nodes. We use them to run measurements targeting several web services from January 2018 to December 2019, collecting millions of TCP and UDP flows using these commercial mobile networks. We illustrate the data collection platforms and describe some of the main experiments. Besides a high-level overview of the dataset, we provide two practical use cases. First, we show how our data can be used as a proxy for web service performance. Second, we study the content delivery infrastructure of Facebook.