Opportunities for Inexpensive Network Measurements From Real Mobile Devices

Along with the continuous growth of Internet usage, mobile users are becoming increasingly relevant as they are responsible for the largest percentage of web traffic. Consequently, a large and growing body of literature has employed cellular data to investigate a wide range of critical Internet-related concerns. However, accessing high-quality cellular datasets can be a challenge for research teams due to scarcity and restricted access. To address such a critical issue, we present a novel measurement methodology for mobile devices capable of passively monitoring Internet traffic in user space, providing comprehensive contextual information about the user and the network. Our proposed methodology is advantageous to collect inexpensive crowdsourced measurements from medium-sized sets of mobile users, and yet to obtain remarkable complementary insights on the target population. We show that the outcomes of this methodology are comparable and consistent with large-scale studies about critical topics such as human mobility patterns, traffic consumption trends, adoption of networking protocols, and penetration of mobile network technologies. Furthermore, we have open-sourced our measurement system to help the community explore potential research directions.