Abstract
People increasingly use mobile devices as their primary means to access the Internet. While it is well known that cellular network operators employ middleboxes, the details of their behavior and their impact on Web performance are poorly understood. This paper presents an analysis of proxy behavior and how transparent Web proxies interact with HTTP traffic in four major US cell carriers. We find that all four carriers use these proxies to interpose on HTTP traffic, but they vary in terms of whether they perform object caching, traffic redirection, image compression, and connection reuse. For example, some transparent proxies unilaterally lower the quality of images, which improves object fetch time but may hurt user satisfaction. We also find that these proxies do not necessarily enhance performance for mobile Web workloads in terms of object fetch times; namely, we observe noticeable benefits only when flow sizes are large and the path between the server and proxy exhibits large latency and/or loss.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alexa Top 100 Websites. http://www.alexa.com/topsites
Data Compression Proxy. https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-compression
Experimenting with QUIC. http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with-quic.html
Grading the Top U.S. Wireless Carriers, 8 August 2014. http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/grading-top-us-wireless-carriers-second-quarter-2014
SPDY Whitepaper. http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper
Sprint Community. https://community.sprint.com/baw/thread/144305
Baccelli, F., Carofiglio, G., Foss, S.: Proxy caching in split TCP: dynamics, stability and tail asymptotics. In: Proceedings of INFOCOM (2008)
Border, J., Kojo, M., Griner, J., Montenegro, G., Shelby, Z.: Performance enhancing proxies intended to mitigate link-related degradations. Technical report, RFC 3135 (2001)
Botta, A., Pescapé, A.: Monitoring and measuring wireless network performance in the presence of middleboxes. In: Proceedings of WONS (2011)
Dukkipati, N., Refice, T., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Herbert, T., Agarwal, A., Jain, A., Sutin, N.: An argument for increasing TCP’s initial congestion window. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM CCR (2010)
Ehsan, N., Liu, M., Ragland, R.J.: Evaluation of performance enhancing proxies in internet over satellite. IJCS 16, 513–534 (2003)
Erman, J., Gerber, A., Hajiaghayi, M.T., Pei, D., Sen, S., Spatscheck, O.: To cache or not to cache: the 3G case. IEEE Internet Comput. 15, 27–34 (2011)
Farkas, V., Héder, B., Nováczki, S.: A split connection TCP proxy in LTE networks. In: Szabó, R., Vidács, A. (eds.) EUNICE 2012. LNCS, vol. 7479, pp. 263–274. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Flach, T., Dukkipati, N., Terzis, A., Raghavan, B., Cardwell, N., Cheng, Y., Jain, A., Hao, S., Katz-Bassett, E., Govindan, R.: Reducing web latency: the virtue of gentle aggression. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM (2013)
Ghobadi, M., Cheng, Y., Jain, A., Mathis, M.: Trickle: rate limiting youtube video streaming. In: Proceedings of USENIX ATC (2012)
Gomez, C., Catalan, M., Viamonte, D., Paradells, J., Calveras, A.: Web browsing optimization over 2.5G and 3G: end-to-end mechanisms vs. usage of performance enhancing proxies. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 8, 213–230 (2008)
Ha, S., Rhee, I.: Hybrid slow start for high-bandwidth and long-distance networks. In: Proceedings of PFLDnet (2008)
Ha, S., Rhee, I., Xu, L.: CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant. ACM SIGOPS Op. Syst. Rev. 42, 64–74 (2008)
Honda, M., Nishida, Y., Raiciu, C., Greenhalgh, A., Handley, M., Tokuda, H.: Is it still possible to extend TCP? In: Proceedings of IMC (2011)
Hui, J., Lau, K., Jain, A., Terzis, A., Smith, J.: How youtube performance is improved in T-mobile network. In: Proceedings of Velocity (2014)
Ivanovich, M., Bickerdike, P., Li, J.: On TCP performance enhancing proxies in a wireless environment. IEEE Commun. Mag. 46, 76–83 (2008)
Jiang, H., Wang, Y., Lee, K., Rhee, I.: Tackling bufferbloat in 3G/4G networks. In:Proceedings of IMC (2012)
Kreibich, C., Weaver, N., Nechaev, B., Paxson, V.: Netalyzr: illuminating the edge network. In: Proceedings of IMC (2010)
Necker, M.C., Scharf, M., Weber, A.: Performance of different proxy concepts in UMTS networks. In: Kotsis, G., Spaniol, O. (eds.) Euro-NGI 2004. LNCS, vol. 3427, pp. 36–51. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Rodriguez, P., Fridman, V.: Performance of PEPs in cellular wireless networks. In: Douglis, F., Davison, B.D. (eds.) Web Content Caching and Distribution, pp. 19–38. Springer, Dordrecht (2004)
Wang, Z., Qian, Z., Xu, Q., Mao, Z., Zhang, M.: An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM (2011)
Weaver, N., Kreibich, C., Dam, M., Paxson, V.: Here be web proxies. In: Faloutsos, M., Kuzmanovic, A. (eds.) PAM 2014. LNCS, vol. 8362, pp. 183–192. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Xu, X., Jiang, Y., Flach, T., Katz-Bassett, E., Choffnes, D., Govindan, R.: Investigating transparent web proxies in cellular networks. Technical report 14-944, University of Southern California (2014)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xu, X., Jiang, Y., Flach, T., Katz-Bassett, E., Choffnes, D., Govindan, R. (2015). Investigating Transparent Web Proxies in Cellular Networks. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15508-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15509-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)