On the feasibility of measuring the internet through smartphone-based crowdsourcing

The large base of Internet-enabled smartphones provides an excellent opportunity for a fine-grained observation of the structure of the Internet and a quantitative evaluation of its characteristics. Smartphones can operate as active mobile monitors and, coordinated by a central entity, they can probe the network on a local scale. Then the results produced by a large number of participants can be merged to obtain a detailed graph of the Internet. Besides the design of the measurement framework, this paper describes the implementation and validation of a traceroute-like tool that is compatible with the Android platform. This confirms that smartphone-based crowdsourcing of network properties can be a viable strategy.