Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds, Tools, and Services

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, developer, research, network operator, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring end-to-end mobile network performance to, among other goals, minimize negative impact on application responsiveness. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. arXiv does not format the URL references correctly. For a correctly formatted version of this paper go to http://www.cs.montana.edu/mwittie/publications/Goel14Survey.pd

Cost-Effective Situational Awareness Through IoT COTS Radios

Situational awareness (SA) through encrypted connectivity in modern warfare is critical to battlefield coordination. Existing solutions provide infrastructure-less connectivity and situational awareness, but at a high cost, power consumption, and bulky form factors that limit their utility for tactical operations. We propose the Beartooth MKII radios as a cost- and power-effective, handy solution for establishing a situational awareness overlay. To integrate with military information brokers, such as the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK), we propose the Beartooth Gateway, which creates an IP network between Beartooth radios, Gateways, and other TAK-capable devices. We show that leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components for MKII and the Gateway can enhance the availability of SA and meet the user requirements in the field while ensuring compatibility with existing IP networks connected to TAK infrastructure.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, targeted to IEEE MILCOM conferenc

Towards Sustainable Scalability of Communication Networks

The functionality of future devices and services will require ever improving network speed and capacity. Whether new innovations will be available to all, or just a privileged few, hinges on the ability of communication networks to scale with the growth of demand. However, our current understanding of how to design and manage networks is ill-suited to respond to changing traffic trends, such as more prevalent inter-user data and real-time communications. The result is grossly inefficient network resource allocation decisions that threaten long-term network scalability. To prevent shortages of network resources in the future, we must eliminate these inefficiencies and proactively evolve communication networks to new types and growing volumes of Internet traffic. The research work presented in this dissertation makes the case for several principles that lead scalable network design. Most importantly, I argue that scalable network designed must not only match growing network demands in magnitude, but also provide the right kind of connectivity with respect to the continual evolution of network traffic patterns

ParaNets: A Parallel Network Architecture for Challenged Networks

Networks characterized by challenges, such as intermittent connectivity, network heterogeneity, and large delays, are called “challenged networks”. We propose a novel network architecture for challenged networks dubbed Parallel Networks, or, ParaNets. The vision behind ParaNets is to have challenged network protocols operate over multiple heterogenous networks, simultaneously available, through one or more devices. We present the ParaNets architecture and discuss its short-term challenges and longterm implications. We also argue, based on current research trends and the ParaNets architecture, for the evolution of the conventional protocol stack to a more flexible cross-layered protocol tree. To demonstrate the potential impact of ParaNets, we use Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks (DTMNs) as a representative challenged network over which we evaluate ParaNets. Our ultimate goal in this paper is to open the way for further work in challenged networks using ParaNets as the underlying architecture

MIST: Cellular data network measurement for mobile applications

Abstract—The rapid growth in the popularity of cellular networks has led to aggressive deployment and a rapid expansion of mobile services. Services based on the integration of cellular networks into the Internet have only recently become available, but are expected to become very popular. One current limitation to the deployment of many of these services is poor or unknown network performance, particularly in the cellular portion of the network. Our goal in this paper is to motivate and present the Mobile Internet Services Test (MIST) platform, a new distributed architecture to measure and characterize cellular network per-formance as experienced by mobile devices. We have used MIST to conduct preliminary measurements; evaluate MIST’s effectiveness; and motivate further measurement research. I