Despite over a decade of Internet access from smartphones, we still have little understanding of the network performance we receive. A number of small testbeds and user studies have enabled progress in the face of these challenges, but with limited scope, duration, coverage and generality.

This previous work suffers from three key limitations that hamper their success.

• First, these individual solutions do not scale: each individual app or measurement platform is inherently limited to the population of participating users running a single piece of software.
• Second, each solution is inconsistent and inflexible in the set of network measurements it supports and the contextual information describing the experimental environment, making it difficult to ensure scientific rigor and to merge disparate datasets.
• Third, these solutions are uncoordinated in how they conduct network measurements: multiple apps can wastefully measure the same property independently or, worse, interfere with each other by running measurements at the same time from the same device.

Mobilyzer addresses these issues by providing a scalable, efficient and controllable open platform for network measurement from mobile devices.

Mobilyzer provides the following components:

• Mobile measurement library for apps. An app-based deployment model is uniquely capable of capturing the detailed view of mobile systems described above. Our Mobilyzer library provides standard measurement tools for users, researchers and developers, and it manages data collection by reporting to cloud-based servers.
• Measurement manager. Mobilyzer allows researchers to conduct mobile network experiments using a collection of mobile devices running apps. To support a wide range of existing and future experiments, the measurement manager can assign programmable collections of measurements to devices in a way that optimizes for efficient use of the available, limited resources. In addition to scheduling measurements, this system coordinates across multiple devices to ensure that measurements do not overwhelm any particular device, network or host being probed.
• Data collection, analysis and archival. We use a cloud-based system to collect, analyze, anonymize and publish data reported from mobile devices. This approach simplifies data management and sharing, provides a centralized repository for tools that analyze the data and facilitates access to a collection of hosts with sufficient capacity to perform the analysis in situ.

For more details, click here.

MobiPerf is an open source application for measuring network performance on mobile platforms. You can measure your network's throughput and latency, as well as other useful network metrics. MobiPerf also performs measurements at regular intervals in the background.

MCoverage is a crowdsourced, cellular network performance survey tool aimed at improving cellular service at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Developed by U-M Information and Technology Services (ITS).

MySpeedTest is an Android application, developed by NOISE lab at Princeton University, aimed to perform network measurements on mobile devices.

Mobilyzer currently works for Android and the source code of Mobilyzer can be found on GitHub. For a more detailed tutorial on how to use Mobilyzer, please read this link. If there are any questions, please send mail to info@mobilyzer-project.mobi.