Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

7-2017

Abstract

Crowdsourcing mobile user’s network performance has become an effective way of understanding and improving mobile network performance and user quality-of-experience. However, the current measurement method is still based on the landline measurement paradigm in which a measurement app measures the path to fixed (measurement or web) servers. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm of measuring per-app mobile network performance. We design and implement MopEye, an Android app to measure network round-trip delay for each app whenever there is app traffic. This opportunistic measurement can be conducted automatically without user intervention. Therefore, it can facilitate a large-scale and long-term crowdsourcing of mobile network performance. In the course of implementing MopEye, we have overcome a suite of challenges to make the continuous latency monitoring lightweight and accurate. We have deployed MopEye to Google Play for an IRB-approved crowdsourcing study in a period of ten months, which obtains over five million measurements from 6,266 Android apps on 2,351 smartphones. The analysis reveals a number of new findings on the per-app network performance and mobile DNS performance.

Keywords

Measurement tool, mobile network performance, smartphones, battery life

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Santa Clara, July 12-14

First Page

445

Last Page

458

ISBN

9781931971386

Publisher

USENIX Association

City or Country

Berkeley, CA

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Comments

See data at https://mopeye.github.io

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