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Measuring and characterizing web page performance is a challeng- ing task. When it comes to the mobile world, the highly varying technology characteristics coupled with the opaque network con- figuration make it even more difficult. Aiming at reproducibility, we present a large scale empirical study of web page performance collected in eleven commercial mobile networks spanning four countries. By digging into measurement from nearly two million web browsing sessions, we shed light on the impact of different web protocols, browsers, and mobile technologies on the web per- formance. We found that the impact of mobile broadband access is sizeable. For example, the median page load time using mobile broadband increases by a third compared to wired access. Mobility clearly stresses the system, with handover causing the most evi- dent performance penalties. Contrariwise, our measurements show that the adoption of HTTP/2 and QUIC has practically negligible impact. To understand the intertwining of all parameters, we adopt state-of-the-art statistical methods to identify the significance of different factors on the web performance. Our analysis confirms the importance of access technology and mobility context as well as webpage composition and browser. Our work highlights the importance of large-scale measurements. Even with our controlled setup, the complexity of the mobile web ecosystem is challenging to untangle. For this, we are releasing the dataset as open data for validation and further research.

This demo paper presents FLEX-MONROE, a platform that facilitates better understanding of current LTE Mobile Broadband(MBB) networks and enables performance improvementsby allowing experimentation with controllable LTE parameters. The platform enables investigating impact oflow-level network parameter tweaks in LTE infrastructure onthe application performance. We argue that FLEX-MONROEis crucial to provide guidelines on improving application performance both in the current and future MBB networks, MONROE (4806)

This paper presents FLEX-MONROE, a unique platform that facilitates achieving a thorough understanding of LTE networks, one that captures the status of current operational MBB networks and that also enables LTE performance improvements by allowing experimentation in an environment with controllable LTE parameters. Using this platform, we propose to investigate how variations in the LTE network parameters influence the network characteristics, which, in turn, translate to application performance metrics that represent the end-user experience. We argue that the FLEX-MONROE platform is crucial to understand, validate and ultimately improve how current operational MBB networks perform, towards providing guidelines for designing future 5G architectures. Furthermore, understanding the effects of low-level tweaks in network parameters in the LTE infrastructure on the application performance is critical to provide guidelines on how to improve the application performance in the current but also future MBB networks