Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2016

Abstract

Cellular service subscribers are increasingly reliant on cellular data services for all kinds of mobile applications. Oftentimes, when subscribers experience frustratingly high network delays and timeouts, they like to know whether their experiences are shared by other users nearby. The question that is often asked is essentially this: “is it just me, or do others around me face the same problem?” In this paper, we describe how we use Tattle, a distributed real-time participatory sensing and monitoring framework, to glean network performance information from users nearby. Tattle relies on recent advances in peer-to-peer device networking, such as Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth Low Energy, and Apple's iBeacon, to exchange key snippets of diagnostic information using very low-power, very short-range local-area wireless interfaces, between participating devices. We propose and develop a robust statistical algorithm, based on quantile regression, which identifies key points in time where a device experiences high delays and outages that are not observed by its neighbors, and decides if the device is performing “normally”, or “abnormally”. This directly answers the “me, or others?” question. We demonstrate and validate the efficacy of our system through real-world measurements of network delay, consisting of over 7,300 time-series that comprises over 443,500 data samples, using commodity smart devices attached to two different providers' networks.

Keywords

Performance evaluation, Delays, Monitoring, IEEE 802.11 Standard, Servers, Sensors, Probes

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the NOMS 2016: 2016 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, April 25-29, 2016, Istanbul, Turkey

First Page

392

Last Page

400

ISBN

9781509002245

Identifier

10.1109/NOMS.2016.7502836

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS.2016.7502836

Download

Share

COinS