Understanding how network and application behavior patterns impact client performance on mobile devices is a difficult yet important problem to solve. Often, we are most interested in the performance experienced by end users, but accurately and effectively measuring performance on uncontrolled mobile devices in the wild continues to be a challenging problem. In this paper, we have developed a tool to allow us to more accurately characterize RRC states using client-based measurements. To do so, we have made use of and contributed to an open-source framework called Mobilyzer, which facilitates collecting complex network measurements on client devices without impacting the user. We have deployed our tool on unmodified devices in 23 countries worldwide to directly measure the impact of RRC state machine configurations on individual packets and network protocols. Demonstrating the value of client-based measurements, our large-scale measurement study allowed us to uncover previously unknown performance problems that can increase network latency by several seconds and increase packet losses by an order of magnitude
