Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mobile Content Hosting Infrastructure in China: A View from a Cellular ISP

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 10771))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Internet users are heavily relying on mobile terminals for content access, where the content is hosted and delivered by either third-party infrastructures (e.g., CDNs and clouds) or the content providers’ own delivery networks, or both. China has the largest mobile Internet population in a single country, and also has unique local regulations and network policies (e.g. heavy content censorship). The content delivery ecosystem in China, as such, may show great disparity from the western one. Yet, there is little visibility into the content hosting infrastructure in Chinese cellular networks. This paper makes the first step toward filling this gap by analyzing a passive DNS trace that consists of 55 billion DNS logs collected from a national-scale cellular ISP. Our in-depth investigation of the content-related features of major ASes reveals that content objects of popular domains are replicated deep into the examined cellular ISP. On the other hand, as much as 20% of tracking traffic, which is mainly generated by trackers owned US-based companies, goes out of China. Our findings cast useful insights for cellular ISPs, CDNs and Internet policy makers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    MaxMind: www.maxmind.com.

  2. 2.

    We manually cross-checked the CNAMEs of the popular domains (FQDNs) in non-mixed clusters to validate the clustering approach. For example, the popular domains in both Baidu clusters use the CNAMEs with the same suffix shifen.com, which is run by Baidu.

  3. 3.

    https://easylist.to.

  4. 4.

    https://disconnect.me/lists/malvertising.

  5. 5.

    Due to DNS caching, we may underestimate the queries mapped to individual IP addresses.

References

  1. Akamai and AT&T renew global alliance (2017). https://goo.gl/b2uHMT

  2. Public suffix list (2017). https://publicsuffix.org

  3. Team Cymru (2017). http://www.team-cymru.org/

  4. Tencent Cloud CDN (2017). https://www.qcloud.com/en/product/cdn.html

  5. VNI mobile forecast highlights (2017). http://www.cisco.com/assets/sol/sp/vni/forecast_highlights_mobile

  6. Adhikari, V.K., Guo, Y., Hao, F., Hilt, V., Zhang, Z.L., Varvello, M., Steiner, M.: Measurement study of Netflix, Hulu, and a tale of three CDNs. IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 23(6), 1984–1997 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Ager, B., Mühlbauer, W., Smaragdakis, G., Uhlig, S.: Web content cartography. In: Proceedings of the ACM IMC (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Calder, M., Fan, X., Hu, Z., Katz-Bassett, E., Heidemann, J., Govindan, R.: Mapping the expansion of Google’s serving infrastructure. In: Proceedings of the ACM IMC (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Callahan, T., Allman, M., Rabinovich, M.: On modern DNS behavior and properties. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 43(3), 7–15 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Chen, F., Sitaraman, R.K., Torres, M.: End-user mapping: Next generation request routing for content delivery. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Chen, T., Ullah, I., Kaafar, M.A., Boreli, R.: Information leakage through mobile analytics services. In: Proceedings of the ACM HotMobile (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Frank, B., Poese, I., Lin, Y., Smaragdakis, G., Feldmann, A., Maggs, B., Rake, J., Uhlig, S., Weber, R.: Pushing CDN-ISP collaboration to the limit. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 43(3), 34–44 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Han, S., Jung, J., Wetherall, D.: A study of third-party tracking by mobile apps in the wild. Technical report, UW-CSE-12-03-01, March 2012

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I., Weiss, Y.: On spectral clustering: analysis and an algorithm. In: Proceedings of the NIPS (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Pujol, E., Hohlfeld, O., Feldmann, A.: Annoyed users: ads and ad-block usage in the wild. In: Proceedings of the ACM IMC (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Triukose, S., Wen, Z., Rabinovich, M.: Measuring a commercial content delivery network. In: Proceedings of the WWW (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Xue, J., Choffnes, D., Wang, J.: CDNs meet CN: An empirical study of CDN deployments in China. In: IEEE Access (2017)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rocky Chang for shepherding our paper and PAM reviewers for their feedback. This work is supported in part by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFE0133000): EU-China study on IoT and 5G(EXCITING), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61572475 and 61502460).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zhenyu Li, Donghui Yang, Chunjing Han & Gaogang Xie

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zhenyu Li, Donghui Yang, Chunjing Han & Gaogang Xie

  3. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhenhua Li

Authors
  1. Zhenyu Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Donghui Yang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zhenhua Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Chunjing Han
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Gaogang Xie
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhenyu Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA

    Robert Beverly

  2. Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Georgios Smaragdakis

  3. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Anja Feldmann

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Li, Z., Yang, D., Li, Z., Han, C., Xie, G. (2018). Mobile Content Hosting Infrastructure in China: A View from a Cellular ISP. In: Beverly, R., Smaragdakis, G., Feldmann, A. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10771. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76480-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76481-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation