RILAnalyzer: A Comprehensive 3G Monitor On Your Phone

TitleRILAnalyzer: A Comprehensive 3G Monitor On Your Phone
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsVallina-Rodriguez, N., Aucinas A., Almeida M., Grunenberger Y., Papagiannaki K., & Crowcroft J.
Other Numbers3609
Abstract

The popularity of smartphones, cloud computing, and theapp store model have led to cellular networks being usedin a completely different way than what they were designedfor. As a consequence, mobile applications impose new challenges in the design and efficient configuration of constrainednetworks to maximize application’s performance. Such difficulties are largely caused by the lack of cross-layer understanding of interactions between different entities - applications, devices, the network and its management plane. In this paper, we describe RILAnalyzer, an open-source tool that provides mechanisms to perform network analysis from within a mobile device. RILAnalyzer is capable of recording low-level radio information and accurate cellular network control-plane data, as well as user-plane data. We demonstrate how such data can be used to identify previously overlooked issues. Through a small user study across four cellular network providers in two European countries we infer how different network configurations are in reality and explore how such configurations interact with application logic, causing network and energy overheads.

Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by funding provided to ICSI through National Science Foundation grant CNS : 1213157 (“User-Centric Network Measurement"). Additional support was provided by the EPRSC INTERNET Project and the Department of Homeland Security under Contract N66001-12-C-0128. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors or originators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Department of Homeland Security.

URLhttps://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/rilanalyzer13.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2013 (IMC 2013), Barcelona, Spain

Abbreviated Authors

N. Vallina-Rodriguez, A. Aucinas, M. Almeida, Y. Grunenberger, D. Papagiannaki, and J. Crowcroft

ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings