On the accuracy of smartphone-based mobile network measurement

As most of mobile apps rely on network connections for their operations, measuring and understanding the performance of mobile networks is becoming very important for end users and operators. Despite the availability of many measurement apps, their measurement accuracy has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, we appraise the accuracy of smartphone-based network performance measurement using the Android platform and the network round-trip time as the metric. We use a multiple-sniffer testbed to overcome the challenge of obtaining a complete trace for acquiring the required timestamps. Our experiment results show that the RTTs measured by the apps are all inflated, ranging from a few milliseconds (ms) to tens of milliseconds. Moreover, the 95% confidence interval can be as high as 2.4ms. A finer-grained analysis reveals that the delay inflation can be introduced both in the Dalvik VM (DVM) and below the Linux kernel. The in-DVM overhead can be mitigated but the other cannot be. Finally, we propose and implement a native app which uses HTTP messages for network measurement, and the delay inflation can be kept under 5ms for almost all cases.