MONROE: Measuring Mobile Broadband Networks in Europe

Abstract

There is a strong need for objective data about stability and performance of Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks, and for tools to rigorously and scientifically assess their performance. In particular, it is important to measure and understand the quality as experienced by the end user. Such information is very valuable for many parties including operators, regulators and policy makers, consumers and society at large, businesses whose services depend on MBB networks, researchers and innovators. In this paper, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform aimed to address this need. MONROE is an open, European-scale, and flexible platform with multi-homing capabilities to run experiments on operational 3G/4G Mobile Broadband networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic and meaningful monitoring and assessment of the performance of MBB networks. MONROE also provides WiFi connectivity mimicking multi-homing in smartphones with both MBB and WiFi interfaces, to allow experimenting on different access technologies as well as to explore new ways of combining them to increase performance and robustness.