CI-SUSTAIN: Collaborative Research: Sustaining Successful Smartphone Testbeds to Enable Diverse Mobile Experiments

由于智能手机等移动和无线设备的计算和网络能力，它们正在改变我们生活的许多方面。随着基于物联网（IoT）的传感和驱动支持的发展，无线设备也在先进制造、运输和个性化健康等各个行业领域引入了范式转变。尽管有这样的前景，但由于对现实的软件和硬件平台以及用户行为的访问有限，大规模评估移动计算科学的创新仍然相当困难。该奖项旨在支持和维持一个已经成功的全球规模的现场实验室，即MobiLab，以进一步实现长期多样化的移动实验。建议的工作将有助于增加本科实验室密集的入门课程和研究生水平的课程，使学生接触到移动计算的各个方面。由此产生的基础设施将对研究界和工业界产生持久的影响，因为它提供了丰富的移动系统数据存储库，这些数据来自实际用例、软件工件和基于数据的结果。MobiLab将减轻移动计算和物联网的陡峭学习曲线，并吸引更多研究人员参与该领域。MobiLab被设想为一个移动计算模拟的著名的行星规模的网络测试平台，PlanetLab，以支持全球规模的智能手机为基础的移动计算科学实验。鉴于许多支持移动实验的MobiLab开源工具已经以众包应用程序的形式或作为特定操作环境中采用的定制工具被广泛部署，本工作侧重于开发几个关键的软件基础设施改进，以实现实验基础设施的长期可持续性。特别是，该项目研究了如何用一种新的可编程上下文触发的测量机制来补充主动和被动测量支持，这有助于平衡测量的开销和捕获数据的准确性。对基础设施的另一个增强是基于待开发的模型精确测量用户体验质量（QoE）的指标设计，该模型允许在未修改的设备和应用程序上测量QoE。基于qos的测量支持与其他MobiLab工具集成，并通过应用程序市场大规模部署。最后，该项目还侧重于社区发展、企业赞助以及与其他组织和活动的合作三个主要的可持续发展活动。

Mobile and wireless devices such as smartphones are transforming many aspects of our lives because of their computational and network capabilities. With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) based sensing and actuation support, wireless devices are also introducing a paradigm shift in various industry sectors such as advanced manufacturing, transportation, and personalized health. Despite this promise, it is still rather difficult to evaluate innovations in mobile computing science at scale due to limited access to realistic software and hardware platforms as well as user behavior. This award aims to support and sustain an already successful global-scale live laboratory known as MobiLab to further enable diverse mobile experiments in the long term. The proposed work will help augment both undergraduate lab-intensive introductory courses as well as graduate-level courses that expose students to various aspects in mobile computing. The resulting infrastructure will have a lasting impact on both the research community as well as industry by providing a rich repository of mobile system data from realistic use cases, software artifacts, and results based on the data. MobiLab will lighten the steep learning curve in mobile computing and IoT, as well as engage more researchers in this field.MobiLab has been conceived as a mobile computing analogue to the well-known planetary-scale networking testbed, PlanetLab, to support global-scale smartphone-based mobile computing science experimentation. Given many of the MobiLab open-source tools to support mobile experiments have already been widely deployed either in the form of crowd-sourced applications or as customized tools adopted in specific operational environment, this work focuses on developing several key software infrastructure improvements to enable long-term sustainability of the experimentation infrastructure. In particular, the project investigates how to complement the active and passive measurement support with a new programmable context-triggered measurement mechanism that helps balance the overhead of the measurement and the accuracy of the data captured. Another enhancement to the infrastructure is the design of metrics to accurately measure user quality of experience (QoE) based on models to be developed that allow QoE to be measured on unmodified devices and apps. QoE-based measurement support is integrated with the other MobiLab tools and deploy it at large scale via application marketplaces. Finally, this project also focuses on three main sustainability activities along the dimensions of community development, corporate sponsorship, as well as collaboration with other organizations and events.