NSF Workshop on Mobile Community Infrastructure

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project funds a workshop on mobile community measurement infrastructure to respond to the growing needs for increased visibility into network behavior to enable cutting-edge research in mobile computing. The workshop will bring together the top researchers in both academia and industry, as well as policy makers from government, to discuss the requirements for such an infrastructure and identify the concrete steps to make progress towards the identified goals. Given the diverse research topics within mobile computing, we will ensure that different research areas and all the important network layers (e.g., physical, MAC, network, transport, and application) are adequately represented at the workshop to ensure a productive outcome from the discussions. Flexible measurement infrastructure support for experimentation are critical for enabling and supporting research work with strong experimental components to help validate ideas and evaluate the design in practice. Mobile computing research work must be evaluated in as realistic network settings as possible to help researchers understand how various factors such as signal strength, network load affect the performance and energy metrics of interest. Currently, there is no environment that enables network visibility from an end-to-end perspective of the cellular network protocol stack: from the end-device all the way to the network server traversing through various network elements. The lack of such an integrated measurement infrastructure greatly hinders the innovation in this important research field. Because it is not trivial to design instrumentation to support diverse needs of researchers in mobile computing, the workshop helps define the goals and requirements of a mobile measurement infrastructure that is designed to last at least 10 years to support cutting-edge research in this space.