{"title":"On the accuracy of smartphone-based mobile network measurement","authors":"Weichao Li, Ricky K. P. Mok, Daoyuan Wu, R. Chang","doi":"10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218402","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"As most of mobile apps rely on network connections for their operations, measuring and understanding the performance of mobile networks is becoming very important for end users and operators. Despite the availability of many measurement apps, their measurement accuracy has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, we appraise the accuracy of smartphone-based network performance measurement using the Android platform and the network round-trip time as the metric. We use a multiple-sniffer testbed to overcome the challenge of obtaining a complete trace for acquiring the required timestamps. Our experiment results show that the RTTs measured by the apps are all inflated, ranging from a few milliseconds (ms) to tens of milliseconds. Moreover, the 95% confidence interval can be as high as 2.4ms. A finer-grained analysis reveals that the delay inflation can be introduced both in the Dalvik VM (DVM) and below the Linux kernel. The in-DVM overhead can be mitigated but the other cannot be. Finally, we propose and implement a native app which uses HTTP messages for network measurement, and the delay inflation can be kept under 5ms for almost all cases.","PeriodicalId":342583,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"26","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218402","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 26
Abstract
As most of mobile apps rely on network connections for their operations, measuring and understanding the performance of mobile networks is becoming very important for end users and operators. Despite the availability of many measurement apps, their measurement accuracy has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, we appraise the accuracy of smartphone-based network performance measurement using the Android platform and the network round-trip time as the metric. We use a multiple-sniffer testbed to overcome the challenge of obtaining a complete trace for acquiring the required timestamps. Our experiment results show that the RTTs measured by the apps are all inflated, ranging from a few milliseconds (ms) to tens of milliseconds. Moreover, the 95% confidence interval can be as high as 2.4ms. A finer-grained analysis reveals that the delay inflation can be introduced both in the Dalvik VM (DVM) and below the Linux kernel. The in-DVM overhead can be mitigated but the other cannot be. Finally, we propose and implement a native app which uses HTTP messages for network measurement, and the delay inflation can be kept under 5ms for almost all cases.
由于大多数移动应用程序的运行都依赖于网络连接,因此测量和理解移动网络的性能对最终用户和运营商来说变得非常重要。尽管有许多测量应用程序,但它们的测量精度还没有得到足够的审查。在本文中,我们使用Android平台,以网络往返时间为度量标准,评估了基于智能手机的网络性能测量的准确性。我们使用多嗅探器测试平台来克服获取所需时间戳的完整跟踪的挑战。我们的实验结果表明,应用程序测量的rtt都被夸大了,范围从几毫秒(ms)到几十毫秒。此外,95%置信区间可高达2.4ms。细粒度的分析表明,延迟膨胀可以在Dalvik VM (DVM)和Linux内核下面引入。可以减少dvm内的开销,但不能减少其他开销。最后,我们提出并实现了一个使用HTTP消息进行网络测量的本地应用程序,在几乎所有情况下延迟膨胀都可以保持在5ms以下。