Sensing and Monitoring for Cellular Networks: a Crowdsourcing Platform from Mobile Smartphones

Mobile smartphones are increasingly used worldwide and play an essential role in the mobile Internet today for green communications and networks. Smartphones have been used as a cost-effective method to sense and monitor mobile cellular networks, e.g., network coverage, mobile traffics, and Quality-of-Experience of subscribers. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing platform for sensing and monitoring cellular networks based on the spatial and temporal data from smartphones, which includes an Android app and Cloud-based data-mining system. Different from previous such systems which only consider the outdoor macro cellular area, in our platform the monitoring of the indoor area is also incorporated. To accurately record the locations of the mobile devices in indoor area, beacon devices are deployed in the ceiling antennas to guide the location computing of mobile smartphones via BLE module, which is more energy-efficient than WIFI. Through our proposed platform a large-scale yet fine-grained spatial-temporal measurements are recorded and analyzed. We show that through this platform a detailed and quick responded sensing and monitoring of the whole cellular networks can be practical, especially in the indoor areas.