RILAnalyzer: a comprehensive 3G monitor on your phone

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones, cloud computing, and the app store model have led to cellular networks being used in a completely different way than what they were designed for. As a consequence, mobile applications impose new challenges in the design and efficient configuration of constrained networks to maximize application's performance. Such difficulties are largely caused by the lack of cross-layer under- standing 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 net- work 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.