Diagnosing path inflation of mobile client traffic

Abstract. As mobile Internet becomes more popular, carriers and content provi-ders must engineer their topologies, routing configurations, and server deploy-ments to maintain good performance for users of mobile devices. Understanding the impact of Internet topology and routing on mobile users requires broad, longi-tudinal network measurements conducted from mobile devices. In this work, we are the first to use such a view to quantify and understand the causes of geograph-ically circuitous routes from mobile clients using 1.5 years of measurements from devices on 4 US carriers. We identify the key elements that can affect the Internet routes taken by traffic from mobile users (client location, server locations, car-rier topology, carrier/content-provider peering). We then develop a methodology to diagnose the specific cause for inflated routes. Although we observe that the evolution of some carrier networks improves performance in some regions, we also observe many clients- even in major metropolitan areas- that continue to take geographically circuitous routes to content providers, due to limitations in the current topologies.