An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks

Abstract

The use of cellular data networks is increasingly popular as network coverage becomes more ubiquitous and many diverse user-contributed mobile applications become available. The growing cellular traffic demand means that cellular network carriers are facing greater challenges to provide users with good network performance and energy efficiency, while protecting networks from potential attacks. To better utilize their limited network resources while securing the network and protecting client devices the carriers have already deployed various network policies that influence traffic behavior. Today, these policies are mostly opaque, though they directly impact application designs and may even introduce network vulnerabilities.