Mobile Network Tracing

Mobile networks are both poorly understood and difficult to experiment with. This RFC argues that mobile network tracing provides both tools to improve our understanding of wireless channels, as well as to build realistic, repeatable testbeds for mobile software and systems. The RFC is a status report on our work tracing mobile networks. Our goal is to begin discussion on a standard format for mobile network tracing as well as a testbed for mobile systems research. We present our format for collecting mobile network traces, and tools to produce from such traces analytical models of mobile network behavior.