Over the last four years we have operated a public smartphone platform testbed called PHONELAB. PHONELAB consists of up to several-hundred participants who run an experimental platform image on their primary smartphone. The experimental platform consists of both instrumentation and experimental changes to platform components, including core Android services and Linux. This paper describes the design of the testbed, the process of conducting PHONELAB experiments, and some of the research the testbed has supported. We also offer many lessons learned along the way, almost all of which have been learned the hard way--through trial and a lot of error. We expect our experiences will help those contemplating operating large user-facing testbeds, anyone conducting experiments on smartphones, and many mobile systems researchers.
The @cite_8 project has been using smartphones to study the social interaction between college students. Free Nexus S smartphones were distrusted to 200 university freshmen for two years. The smartphones ran modified CyanogenMod and instrumentation was added to log the communication events---such as phone calls, SMS, Facebook posts and Bluetooth proximity. Unlike , NetSense focuses on behavioral rather than systems experiments. The testbed is not open, nor is there a way to distribute platform modifications. At this point NetSense has moved to running as an app and utilizing a bring your own device'' model, rendering it complicated or impossible to perform platform experiments.
@cite_8
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Over the past few years, smartphones have emerged as one of the most popular mechanisms for accessing content across the Internet driving considerable research to improve wireless performance. A key foundation for such research efforts is the proper understanding of user behavior. However, the gathering of live smartphone data at scale is often difficult and expensive. The focus of this paper is to explore the lessons learned from a two year study of two hundred smart phone users at the University of Notre Dame. In this paper, we offer commentary with regards to the entire process of the study covering aspects including funding considerations, technical architecture design, lessons learned, and recommendations for future efforts gathering live user data.