Measuring the Internet Topology with Smartphones

Despite the very well known smartphone issues such as on-off behaviour and battery/bandwidth limitations, in this paper we show that smartphones can be successfully employed in a crowdsourcing system to perform Internet AS-level topology discovery. We propose and illustrate a measurement methodology that takes these issues into account. We implemented such methodology in Portolan, our smartphone-based crowdsourcing system, and ran six months of measurements. We show that smartphones mobility allows to obtain measurements from 706 different ASes with just 200 active devices. Moreover, we show that our methodology manages to bring novelty with relatively few measurements. On average 27.75% of the AS links found by Portolan are not found by BGP measurements.

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