An Open Dataset of Operational Mobile Networks

Mobile networks have become ubiquitous and the primary meansto access the Internet, and the traffic they generate has rapidlyincreased over the last years. The technology and service diversityin mobile networks call for extensive and accurate measurementsto ensure the proper functioning of the networks and rapidly spotimpairments. However, the measurement of mobile networks iscomplicated by their scale, and, thus, expensive, especially due tothe diversity of deployments, technologies, and web services. Inthis paper, we present and provide access to the largest open in-ternational mobile network dataset collected using the MONROEplatform spanning six countries, 27 mobile network operators, and120 measurement nodes. We use them to run measurements tar-geting several web services from January 2018 to December 2019,collecting millions of TCP and UDP flows using these commercialmobile networks. We illustrate the data collection platforms and de-scribe some of the main experiments. Besides a high-level overviewof the dataset, we provide two practical use cases. First, we showhow our data can be used as a proxy for web service performance.Second, we study the content delivery infrastructure of Facebook.