@inproceedings {Fia, title = {Characterizing Web Services Provisioning via CDNs: The Case of Facebook}, booktitle = {5th International Workshop on TRaffic Analysis and Characterization}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Nicosia, Cyprus}, abstract = {

Today{\textquoteright}s Internet consists of massive scale web\ services and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This paper sheds\ light on the way major Internet-scale web services content is\ hosted and delivered. By analyzing a full month of HTTP traffic\ traces collected at the mobile network of a major European ISP,\ we characterize the paradigmatic case of Facebook, considering\ not only the traffic flows but also the main organizations and\ CDNs providing them. Our study serves the main purpose of\ better understanding how major web services are provisioned\ in today{\textquoteright}s Internet, paying special attention to the temporal\ dynamics of the service delivery and the interplays between the\ involved hosting organizations. To the best of our knowledge, this\ is the first paper providing such an analysis in mobile networks.

}, keywords = {Akamai, Content Delivery Networks, Facebook, HTTP Traffic, mobile networks}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Alessandro D{\textquoteright}Alconzo and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Fiaa, title = {Vivisecting WhatsApp through Large-Scale Measurements in Mobile Networks}, booktitle = {SIGCOMM 2014}, year = {2014}, month = {08/2014}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Chicago, USA}, abstract = {

WhatsApp, the new giant in instant multimedia messaging in mobile networks is rapidly increasing its popularity, taking over the traditional SMS/MMS messaging. In this paper we present the first large-scale characterization of WhatsApp, useful among others to ISPs willing to understand the impacts of this and similar applications on their networks. Through the combined analysis of passive measurements at the core of a national mobile network, worldwide geo-distributed active measurements, and traffic analysis at end devices, we show that: (i) the WhatsApp hosting architecture is highly centralized and exclusively located in the US; (ii) video sharing covers almost 40\% of the total WhatsApp traffic volume; (iii) flow characteristics depend on the OS of the end device; (iv) despite the big latencies to US servers, download throughputs are as high as 1.5 Mbps; (v) users react immediately and negatively to service outages through social networks feedbacks.

}, keywords = {Large-Scale Measurements, mobile networks, WhatsApp}, author = {Pierdomenico Fiadino and Mirko Schiavone and Pedro Casas} } @inproceedings {Ale2013, title = {Is There a Case for Mobile Phone Content Pre-staging?}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (Best Short Paper Award)}, year = {2013}, month = {12/2013}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, abstract = {

Content caching is a fundamental building block of the Internet. Caches are widely deployed at network edges to improve performance for end-users, and to reduce load on web servers and the backbone network. Considering mobile 3G/4G networks, however, the bottleneck is at the access link, where bandwidth is shared among all mobile terminals. As such, per-user capacity cannot grow to cope with the traffic demand. Unfortunately, caching policies would not reduce the load on the wireless link which would have to carry multiple copies of the same object that is being downloaded by multiple mobile terminals sharing the same access link.

In this paper we investigate if it is worth to push the caching paradigm even farther. We hypothesize a system in which mobile terminals implement a local cache, where popular content can be pushed/pre-staged. This exploits the peculiar broadcast capability of the wireless channels to replicate content "for free" on all terminals, saving the cost of transmitting multiple copies of those popular objects. Relying on a large data set collected from a European mobile carrier, we analyse the content popularity characteristics of mobile traffic, and quantify the benefit that the push-to-mobile system would produce. We found that content pre-staging, by proactively and periodically broadcasting "bundles" of popular objects to devices, allows to both greatly i) improve users{\textquoteright} performance and ii) reduce up to 20\% (40\%) the downloaded volume (number of requests) in optimistic scenarios with a bundle of 100 MB. However, some technical constraints and content characteristics could question the actual gain such system would reach in practice.

}, keywords = {content pre-staging, mobile networks}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2101-3}, doi = {10.1145/2535372.2535414}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2535372.2535414}, author = {Finamore, Alessandro and Mellia, Marco and Gilani, Zafar and Papagiannaki, Konstantina and Erramilli, Vijay and Grunenberger, Yan} }