NeTS: EAGER: MITATE: Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

This project creates a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation (MITATE) - a large-scale mobile application prototyping platform. MITATE will enable developers to evaluate protocol design choices, application deployment alternatives, and component mobility mechanisms - all in live mobile networks spanning geographic areas, carriers, and devices. MITATE will also benefit the computing research community by lowering the barrier to experimentation on mobile devices in production networks. MITATE allows experimentation with custom mobile application traffic between mobile devices and cloud infrastructure endpoints, on which application back-end logic is deployed. MITATE is designed as a collaborative framework, in which participants contribute their mobile network resources and are allowed, in turn, to run their traffic experiments on others devices. The MITATE design, specifically the tit-for-tat data credit system and the separation of traffic generation functionality from application logic, will ensure safe and self-scaling testbed operation. This testbed will enable novel and compelling research at Montana State University on self-optimizing low latency protocols.