LiveLabs: building an in-situ real-time mobile experimentation testbed

Abstract

We present LiveLabs, a mobile experimentation testbed that is currently deployed across our university campus with further deployments at a large shopping mall, a commercial airport, and a resort island soon to follow. The key goal of LiveLabs is to allow in-situ real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers with real participants on their actual smart phones. We describe how LiveLabs works, and then explain the novel R&D required to realise it. We end with a description of the current LiveLabs status (> 700 active participants to date) as well as present some key lessons learned.