COMMUNICATION AWARENESS FOR MOBILE PHONES

Symbian Protocol Analyzer for mobile terminals

SymPA is a protocol analyzer for mobile phones that allows all the incoming
TCP/IP traffic to be captured without interfering with the normal performance of the
terminal. The main design goals for this tool have been the following:

- To capture all incoming IP packets, while avoiding information overload.

- To perform efficient resource management, according to constraints on power
processing and battery life of mobile devices.

- To include basic functions for network management such as ping and tracert.

- To provide interfaces for processing captured information and for exporting it to
other environments.

SymPA working diagram

When SymPA is in capture mode, all IP packets that arrive to the mobile devices
from GPRS/UMTS connections are saved in buffers in raw format. SymPA runs the
background without interfering in the performance of active applications. In parallel,
network parameters are observed periodically. When the capturing session finishes,
the contents of the buffers is stored in files and later adapted to text2pcap input
format, the lipcap format conversion tool is included in the free distribution of the
Ethereal analyzer. The files can be transferred to a computer via USB, infrared or
Bluetooth, depending on the terminal availability of these technologies.
Lipcap files can be analyzed directly with Ethereal, taking advantage of the great
variety of filtering options, statistical analysis and graph generation features of this
application, as depicted in figure.

Scenarios and Use Cases


In UMTS soft handover allows seamless 
handover. During soft handover, a mobile
station is in the overlapping cell coverage 
area of two sectors belonging to different
base stations. Communication between the 
mobile station and the base station take
place concurrently via two air interface 
channels from each base station separately.
In GSM the macrodiversity cannot be used 
and the communication is interrupted. 
Where interruptions are lengthy, the buffered
packets at network elements can overflow, 
and may result in packets loss. This 
behaviour is depicted in figure. At the same 
time as the handover takes place, the 
receptionof packets stops during 7 seconds. 
After that,the retransmission of packet 
loss is initiated.

Publications and Related Works

Juan C. Cuevas, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas, Pedro J. Reche “Migrando una aplicación domótica a entornos móviles”, XIV Jornadas Telecom I+D, 2004
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas "Análisis de Symbian OS para desarrollar aplicaciones distribuidas sobre terminales GPRS", XIII Jornadas de Concurrencia y Sistemas Distribuidos pp.259-269, 2005
Almudena Díaz, Alejandro Gil, Pedro Merino, Javier Muñoz "x-AppMonitor µAgent: Una herramienta para la medida del Rendimiento de servicios en redes GSM/GPRS y 3G desde los Terminales de Usuario", XV Jornadas Telecom I+D, 2005
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas "SymPA, un analizador de protocolos para dispositivos móviles", II Congreso IberoAmericano sobre Computación Ubicua, 2006
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas "Performance monitoring and analysis of wireless communications protocols for mobile devices , I International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, 2006
Almudena Díaz, Alejandro Gil, Pedro Merino, Javier Muñoz "x-AppMonitor µAgent: a tool for QoS measurements in cellular networks", 3rd International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems, 2006
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas "Communication Awareness in Mobile Devices", Real World Ubicomp Deployments: Lesson Learned, Work in Progress, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol 5, No.3, July-September 2006
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas "Communication Awareness in Mobile Devices", IEEE Distributed Systems Online Alert, Vol 7, No 9, September 2006
A. Díaz, P. Merino, L. Panizo, A.M. Recio, "Evaluating Video Streaming over GPRS/UMTS networks: A Practical Case", in IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference VTC2007-Spring(VTC2007 Spring), 22 - 25 April 2007
A. Díaz, P. Merino, L. Panizo, A.M. Recio, ""Experimental analysis of peer-to-peer streaming in cellular networks", in IEEE 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA-07), May 21-23 2007
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F. Javier Rivas, "Customer-centric measurements on mobile phones", in Proceedings on 12th IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics. (ICSE 2008. Vilamoura, Portugal. 14-16 April, 2008
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, "Towards a lightweight middleware for mobile multimedia communications awareness", in Proceedings on Mobimedia 2008 MOBIMEDIA ’08, July 7-9, 2008, Oulu, Finland
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, F.Javier Rivas, "Mobile Application Profiling for Connected Smartphones", to be published in IEEE Pervasive Computing
Almudena Díaz, Pedro Merino, "SymPA: a Measurement Tool for Evaluating the Performance of IP Services in Mobile Networks" to be presented in the 5th ACM International Symposium on QoS and Security for Wireless and Mobile Networks, Q2SWinet, 2009

almudiaz@lcc.uma.es
Last update 2009-07-21