Crowdsourcing Access Network Spectrum Allocation Using Smartphones

The hundreds of millions of deployed smartphones provide an unprecedented opportunity to collect data to monitor, debug, and continuously adapt wireless networks to improve performance. In contrast with previous mobile devices, such as laptops, smartphones are always on but mostly idle, making them available to perform measurements that help other nearby active devices make better use of available network resources. We present the design of PocketSniffer, a system delivering wireless measurements from smartphones both to network administrators for monitoring and debugging purposes and to algorithms performing real-time network adaptation. By collecting data from smartphones, PocketSniffer supports novel adaptation algorithms designed around common deployment scenarios involving both cooperative and self-interested clients and networks. We present preliminary results from a prototype and discuss challenges to realizing this vision.