Mobile network traffic engineering and management activities require traffic traces where each packet or flow is associated with some ground truth regarding mobile app or protocol. This paper presents a system named mobilegt that collects mobile traffic and links the ground truth to it without rooting mobile devices. It consists of two elements: mobilegt client and mobilegt server. Mobilegt client iteratively probes monitored mobile nodes' kernel to obtain socket information on active TCP/UDP sessions. Mobilegt server captures the packets generated on monitored nodes at the aid of Virtual Private Network (VPN), and labels each packet/flow by exploring the association between socket and packet. Our preliminary experimental results show that mobilegt can tag more than 98% of bytes and 93% of flows on average without significantly affecting CPU load.
['Zhen Liu', 'Ruoyu Wang', 'Deyu Tang', 'Peng Yang']
A System for Linking Ground Truth to Mobile Network Traffic