RAPID: Assessing the Impact on Operational Mobile Networks in the Face of COVID-19 Public Health Crisis

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This project proposes to measure and diagnose performance and reliability of the national 4G/4.5G mobile networks in face of COVID-19 pandemic. The objective is to meet the immediate need of assessing operational mobile networks, unveiling technical issues, understanding their pressing challenges, and proposing remedies without major infrastructure upgrade during this public health crisis. The project exploits a novel on-device measurement approach. It leverages extensive efforts in building software tools and conducting large-scale measurement in the recent years to conduct five thrusts. First, it plans to conduct a longitudinal study to quantify how performance of US carrier networks change in face of COVID-19 and analyze why behind the pressing technical challenges. Second, it plans to design and assess data-driven device-side solutions to boost data performance without any infrastructure upgrade. Third, it plans to characterize and diagnose failures which likely occur more often during this period of time. Forth, it plans to assess security issues disclosed in prior studies and examine how possible attacks vary. Fifth, it plans to open up data and facilitate researchers in the community to empower long-term network innovations.The project will help assess the mobile users' experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the long term, open datasets collected and released by this project will empower data-driven software solutions to efficiently utilize enhanced network capabilities and accelerate 5G innovations in mobile network research community.The software tools and collected data will be available at http://milab.cs.purdue.edu/. The repository will be maintained for at least five years.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.