Crowdsourcing Mobile Apps' Network Performance From Smartphones: System and Measurement

Speaker:        Dr. Rocky K. C. Chang
                The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title:          "Crowdsourcing Mobile Apps' Network Performance From
                Smartphones: System and Measurement"

Date:           Monday, 26 March 2018

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Crowdsourcing mobile user's network performance has become an effective
way of understanding, and potentially improving, mobile network
performance and user quality-of-experience. The current measurement apps
on smartphones are still based on the landline measurement paradigm which
uses user-specified remote end-points or fixed measurement server. Due to
the diverse locations of various servers and user mobility, such landline
measurement, however, will not correlate well with the user's experience.

In this talk, we will introduce a new paradigm of measuring mobile network
performance for each app. This per-app measurement capability will
facilitate a more fine-grained comparison of services and ISP performance,
and enhance the diagnosis of application performance issues. We design and
implement a novel passive approach which does not require the root
privilege to measure the latency between each app and its server. In the
course of implementing our prototype app called MopEye, we have overcome a
suite of challenges to make the continuous latency monitoring lightweight
and accurate. We will also present a number of new findings on the per-app
and DNS network performance experienced by real users from over 10K
installs at Google Play.


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Biography:

Rocky is an Associate Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
and also currently a Principal Researcher at Huawei Research during his
sabbatical. Rocky's research is devoted to the Internet infrastructure and
security domain, particularly on Internet measurement. He is active in
working with the industry and providing measurement services to
universities and government departments. For almost ten years, he and his
team have been developing and operating a measurement platform to monitor
the health of the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network (HARNET). He has
received awards in the areas of teaching, and securing of industrial
research grants and consultancy. Outside the research world, he served as
the Warden of the undergraduate Lizhi Hall for five years. He also
pioneered the CSI! Inception competition for Freshmen and PolyHack, the
first Hackathon on the PolyU campus. He loves teaching and interacting
with undergraduate students, especially Freshmen.