Wireless Network Instabilities in the Wild: Measurement, Applications (Non)Resilience, and OS Remedy

Abstract

While the bandwidth and latency improvement of both WiFi and cellular data networks in the past decades are plenty evident, the extent of signal strength fluctuation and network disruptions (unexpected switching or disconnections) experienced by mobile users in today’s network deployment remains less clear. This paper makes three contributions. First, we conduct the first extensive measurement of network disruptions and significant signal strength fluctuations (together denoted as network instabilities) experienced by 2000 smartphones in the wild. Our results show that network disruptions and signal strength fluctuations remains prevalent as we moved into the 4G era. Second, we study how well popular mobile apps today handle such network instabilities. Our results show that even some of the most popular mobile apps do not implement any disruption-tolerant mechanisms. Third, we present Janus, an intelligent interface management framework that exploits the multiple interfaces on a handset to transparently handle network disruptions and satisfy apps’ performance requirement. We have implemented a prototype of Janus and our evaluation using a set of popular apps shows that Janus can: 1) transparently and efficiently handle network disruptions; 2) reduce video stalls by 2.9 times and increase 31% of the time of good voice quality; 3) reduce traffic size by 26.4% and energy consumption by 16.3% compared to naive solutions.