Democratizing cellular access with CellBricks

Abstract

Markets in which competition thrives are good for both consumers and innovation but, unfortunately, competition is not thriving in the increasingly important cellular market. We propose CellBricks, a novel cellular architecture that lowers the barrier to entry for new operators by enabling users to consume access on-demand from any available cellular operator — small or large, trusted or untrusted. CellBricks achieves this by moving support for mobility and user management (authentication and billing) out of the network and into end hosts. These changes, we believe, bring valuable benefits beyond enabling competition: they lead to a cellular infrastructure that is simpler and more efficient. We design, build, and evaluate CellBricks, showing that its benefits come at little-to-no cost in performance, with application performance overhead between -1.6% to 3.1% of that achieved by current cellular infrastructure.