Obtaining in-context measurements of cellular network performance

Network service providers, and other parties, require an accurate understanding of the performance cellular networks deliver to users. In particular, they often seek a measure of the network performance users experience solely when they are interacting with their device---a measure we call in-context. Acquiring such measures is challenging due to the many factors, including time and physical context, that influence cellular network performance. This paper makes two contributions. First, we conduct a large scale measurement study, based on data collected from a large cellular provider and from hundreds of controlled experiments, to shed light on the issues underlying in-context measurements. Our novel observations show that measurements must be conducted on devices which (i) recently used the network as a result of user interaction with the device, (ii) remain in the same macro-environment (e.g., indoors and stationary), and in some cases the same micro-environment (e.g., in the user's hand), during the period between normal usage and a subsequent measurement, and (iii) are currently sending/ receiving little or no user-generated traffic. Second, we design and deploy a prototype active measurement service for Android phones based on these key insights. Our analysis of 1650 measurements gathered from 12 volunteer devices shows that the system is able to obtain average throughput measurements that accurately quantify the performance experienced during times of active device and network usage.