Measurement Platforms for Mobile Devices
Instruments for seeing what a phone actually does.
Project Overview
Studying mobile networks and applications runs into a practical wall: the device. A phone will not let you sit in the middle of its traffic, its battery behaviour cannot be simulated convincingly, and the person holding it has their own plans. Each of those obstacles produced an instrument.
These are tools rather than findings — the apparatus that the measurement studies in our mobile thread depend on.
MBZ: a middlebox on the handset
Traditional middleboxes see traffic at the far end of the first link, by which point the interesting attribution — which app, which library, which permission — is gone. MBZ takes that vantage point and moves it onto the device: an extensible platform that intercepts and can modify traffic before it leaves the handset, or on arrival before it reaches the operating system.
Conceptually it gives a middlebox’s view with the device’s context attached, which is what makes it possible to ask questions about specific applications rather than about aggregate flows. Back in Control describes the design.
BatteryLab: power measurement on real hardware
Energy claims about mobile software are usually made with models, because measuring real draw needs physical instrumentation attached to a real device. BatteryLab is a collaborative platform that shares that instrumentation: devices wired to power monitors, hosted across sites, available remotely so researchers can measure genuine power consumption on hardware they do not own.
Crowd (Soft) Control
The third obstacle is the human. Opportunistic sensing takes measurements wherever participants happen to be, which leaves coverage to chance. Crowd (Soft) Control asked what becomes possible when participants can be gently steered toward where a measurement is needed, and the later HotMobile paper takes up the question of incentives — what actually motivates people to participate, and why one scheme does not fit every population.
Software
- Middle-Box Zero (MBZ) — an extensible platform to intercept and modify traffic on the device, before it leaves or before it reaches the OS. GitHub
- BatteryLab — a distributed platform for power monitoring of mobile devices, led by Matteo Varvello. Its project site no longer resolves; see the PAM 2022 paper below.
Papers
- Crowd (Soft) Control — HotMobile 2012
- No One-Size Fits All: Towards a Principled Approach for Incentives in Mobile Crowdsourcing — HotMobile 2014
- Back in Control: An Extensible Middle-Box on Your Phone — arXiv, 2020
- BatteryLab: A Collaborative Platform for Power Monitoring — PAM 2022
Coverage
Crowd Soft Control was covered by Communications of the ACM, Wired, and Discovery News in 2012.
People
Lead & PI
- Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)
Students
- John P. Rula
- James Newman
Collaborators
- Matteo Varvello (Nokia Bell Labs)
- Kleomenis Katevas, Mihai Plesa, Hamed Haddadi (Brave Software / Imperial College London)
- Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez (IMDEA Networks)
- Abbas Razaghpanah (Stony Brook University)
- Mark Allman (ICSI)