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A Comparative Analysis of Global Mobile Network Aggregators
Univ Carlos III Madrid, Dept Telemat Engn, Leganes 28911, Spain..
Georgia Inst Technol, Atlanta, GA 30318 USA..
Cisco ThousandEyes, London TW7 5QD, England..
University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain.
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2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, E-ISSN 1932-4537, Vol. 22, no 5, p. 4651-4667Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The mobile telecommunication industry is undergoing continuous evolution to cope with ever increasing service requirements and expectations of end users. This has recently led to the rise of Mobile Network Aggregators (MNAs), a new type of global virtual operators that deliver mobile communication services by utilizing multiple Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), dynamically connecting to the one that best meets their customers' needs based on location and time. MNAs can then offer optimized global coverage by connecting to local MNOs that have limited (e.g., national) geographic service. In this paper, we provide a first in-depth analysis of the operations of three major MNAs: Google Fi, Twilio, and Truphone. We conduct performance measurements across these MNAs for critical applications spanning DNS, Web browsing, and video streaming, and compare their performance against that of a traditional MNO from two very diverse geographical locations, US and Spain. We find that MNAs may introduce some delay compared to local MNOs in the region where the user is roaming, yet they offer significant performance improvements over the traditional MNOs roaming model, such as home-routed roaming. To fully assess the potential benefits of the MNA model, we also carry out emulation studies assessing the potential performance gains that MNAs could achieve by deploying both control and user plane functions of open-source 5G implementations across different Amazon Web Services locations.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE, 2025. Vol. 22, no 5, p. 4651-4667
Keywords [en]
Mobile networks, roaming, application performance, network aggregators, 5G
National Category
Communication Systems Telecommunications Information Systems
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-107509DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2025.3582089ISI: 001589982800010Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105009293033OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-107509DiVA, id: diva2:2013658
Available from: 2025-11-13 Created: 2025-11-13 Last updated: 2026-02-12Bibliographically approved

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Alay, Özgü

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