MIST: Cellular data network measurement for mobile applications

The rapid growth in the popularity of cellular networks has led to aggressive deployment and a rapid expansion of mobile services. Services based on the integration of cellular networks into the Internet have only recently become available, but are expected to become very popular. One current limitation to the deployment of many of these services is poor or unknown network performance, particularly in the cellular portion of the network. Our goal in this paper is to motivate and present the Mobile Internet Services Test (MIST) platform, a new distributed architecture to measure and characterize cellular network performance as experienced by mobile devices. We have used MIST to conduct preliminary measurements; evaluate MIST’s effectiveness; and motivate further measurement research.