Crowdsourcing-based mobile network tomography for xG wireless systems

Abstract

Network size and number of mobile users are ever-increasing with the advancements in cellular network technologies. Hence, this situation makes the network monitoring highly complex. Although there are numerous network tomography approaches, service providers need real-time network monitoring tools to provide better network utilization. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing-based real-time network tomography framework. In the proposed framework, channel condition and user data usage are monitored via an application at the mobile terminals, and then the mobile terminals transmit their data to the server. In this way, the network and user behavior can be continuously monitored, and real-time actions can be implemented to improve the network performance. By using the proposed framework, we propose an optimization framework for the amount and reporting frequency of the transmitted data to avoid battery drain at the mobile terminal and network congestion. At the end, we provide simulation results for the proposed optimization framework.