MopEye: Opportunistic monitoring of per-app mobile network performance

• Main Authors: WU, Daoyuan, CHANG, Rocky K. C., LI, Weichao, CHENG, Eric K. T., GAO, Debin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Measurement tool; mobile network performance; smartphones; battery life; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3965; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4967/viewcontent/atc17.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.