On the Feasibility of Measuring the Internet Through Smartphone-based Crowdsourcing

Adriano Faggiani (1) , Enrico Gregori (1) , Luciano Lenzini (2) , Simone Mainardi (1, 2) , Alessio Vecchio (2)

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione [Pisa]
2 IIT-CNR - Istituto di Informatica e Telematica

The large base of Internet-enabled smartphones provides an excellent opportunity for a fine-grained observation of the structure of the Internet and a quantitative evaluation of its characteristics. Smartphones can operate as active mobile monitors and, coordinated by a central entity, they can probe the network on a local scale. Then the results produced by a large number of participants can be merged to obtain a detailed graph of the Internet. Besides the design of the measurement framework, this paper describes the implementation and validation of a traceroute-like tool that is compatible with the Android platform. This confirms that smartphone-based crowdsourcing of network properties can be a viable strategy.

Domaines: Informatique mobile; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Adriano Faggiani, Enrico Gregori, Luciano Lenzini, Simone Mainardi, Alessio Vecchio. On the Feasibility of Measuring the Internet Through Smartphone-based Crowdsourcing. WiOpt'12: Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks, May 2012, Paderborn, Germany. pp.318-323. ⟨hal-00767064⟩