Abstract
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) follows the end-to-end principle – when a client establishes a connection with a server, the connection is only shared by two physical machines, the client and the server. In current cellular networks, a myriad of middleboxes disregard the end-to-end principle to enable network operators to deploy services such as content caching, compression, and protocol optimization to improve end-to-end network performance. If server operators remain unaware of such middleboxes, TCP connections may not be optimized specifically for middleboxes and instead are optimized for mobile devices. We argue that without costly active measurement, it remains challenging for server operators to reliably detect the presence of middleboxes that split TCP connections. In this paper, we present three techniques (based on latency, loss, and characteristics of TCP SYN packets) for server operators to passively identify Connection Terminating Proxies (CTPs) in cellular networks, with the goal to optimize TCP connections for faster content delivery. Using TCP and HTTP logs recorded by Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers, we demonstrate that our passive techniques are as reliable and accurate as active techniques in detecting CTPs deployed in cellular networks worldwide.
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
Navigation Timing, August 2015. http://w3c.github.io/navigation-timing/
NSF Workshop on Achieving Ultra-Low Latencies in Wireless Networks, March 2015. http://inlab.lab.asu.edu/nsf/files/WorkshopReport.pdf
Real User Monitoring, August 2015. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/real-user-monitoring.jsp
Unbiased Wireless Network Information, August 2015. http://www.sensorly.com
Border, J., Kojo, M., Griner, J., Montenegro, G., Shelby, Z.: Performance Enhancing Proxies Intended to Mitigate Link-Related Degradations, June 2001. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3135
Botta, A., Pescape, A.: Monitoring and measuring wireless network performance in the presence of middleboxes. In: Conference on Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services, January 2012
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. SIGCOMM CCR 40(3), 26–33 (2010)
Ehsan, N., Liu, M., Ragland, R.J.: Evaluation of performance enhancing proxies in internet over satellite. Int. J. Commun. Syst. 16(6), 513–534 (2003)
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)
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. Wireless Commun. Mob. Comput. 8, 213–230 (2008)
Ivanovich, M., Bickerdike, P., Li, J.: On TCP performance enhancing proxies in a wireless environment. IEEE Commun. Mag. 46, 76–83 (2008)
Naylor, D., Schomp, K., Varvello, M., Leontiadis, I., Blackburn, J., Lopez, D., Papagiannaki, K., Rodriguez, P.R., Steenkiste, P.: Investigating transparent web proxies in cellular networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM, August 2015
Necker, M., Scharf, M., Weber, A.: Performance of different proxy concepts in UMTS networks. In: Wireless Systems and Mobility in Next Generation Internet, June 2004
Thomson, M.: Blind Proxy Caching, July 2015. https://httpworkshop.github.io/workshop/presentations/thomson-cache.pdf
Wang, Z., Qian, Z., Xu, Q., Mao, Z., Zhang, M.: An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM, August 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. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds.) PAM 2015. LNCS, vol. 8995, pp. 262–276. Springer, Heidelberg (2015)
Acknowledgments
We thank Ruomei Gao, Chris Heller, Ajay Kumar Miyyapuram, and Kanika Shah for their invaluable insights on refining our data collection process. We also thank National Science Foundation for supporting this work through grant NSF CNS-1555591.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Goel, U., Steiner, M., Wittie, M.P., Flack, M., Ludin, S. (2016). Detecting Cellular Middleboxes Using Passive Measurement Techniques. In: Karagiannis, T., Dimitropoulos, X. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9631. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30504-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30505-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)