Overview

The goal of MobileInsight is to provide an easy-to-use and extensible environment for mobile network monitoring and analysis on end devices. It should be aligned with the needs of networking research and industrial usage. It is applicable to various usage scenarios, such as realtime network status monitoring, online and offline analysis, network diagnosis.

The MobileInsight core has two types of modules: monitors and analyzers. The monitor extracts low-level logs/messages from the device’s network protocol stack at realtime, and can be used to drive the mobile network analysis. The analyzers are event-driven, and can perform online/offline mobile network analysis. Currently MobileInsight supports analysis of major cellular protocols, including radio resource control (RRC), mobility management (EMM) and session management (ESM). The monitors can run separately without analyzers, but the analyzers should be driven by at least one monitor. Please see the examples on how to use monitors and analyzers.

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MobileInsight allows to user to develop its own analyzers for customized usage. The users can build its own analyzes on top of existing ones (as shown in above figure). Analyzers can run concurrently for multiple analysis. Please see tutorial-customize-analyzer on how to extend analyzers.

MobileInsight 2.0 has both mobile version and desktop version. The mobile version runs inside the phone. It can be used to collect background logs, and/or benefit mobile phones in a variety of scenarios, such as failure diagnosis, performance improvement, and security loophole detection. The desktop version supports Windows/Linux/OSX, and is suitable for more complex analysis. It requires to connect the phone to a desktop machine. Both the mobile and desktop version share the same APIs. The same monitoring/analysis code can run on both versions without modifications. MobileInsight currently supports Android phones with Qualcomm chipset only. Our future version will support iOS and other cellular chipsets (e.g., Mediatek and Intel Gold).