Network and Application Performance Measurement Challenges on Android Devices

Modern mobile systems are optimized for energy-efficient computation and communications, and these optimizations affect the way they use the network, and thus the performance of the applications. Therefore, understanding network and application performance are essential for debugging, improving user experience, and performance comparison. In recent years, several tools have emerged that analyze network performance of mobile applications in situ with the help of the VPN service. However, there is a limited understanding of how these measurement tools and system optimizations affect the network and application performance. This paper first demonstrates that mobile systems employ energy-aware system hardware tuning, affecting network latency and throughput. We next show that the VPN-based tools, such as Lumen, PrivacyGuard, and Video Optimizer, aid in ambiguous network performance measurements and degrade the application performance. Our findings suggest that sound Internet traffic measurement on Android devices requires a good understanding of the device, networks, measurement tools, and applications.