MetricTect: Mobile network performance from user side

Community networks present an attractive approach to connecting the unconnected in rural areas, which are typically abandoned by telecom operators due to lack of assurance of return on investment. However, compared to mobile telecommunication networks that offer broad coverage, nodes in community networks have a short range. Although these nodes are placed in areas of interest, their location does not always guarantee optimal user coverage. This is because the geographic distribution of future network users is difficult to predict during network planning. Moreover, without knowledge of the QoS on the user side, it would be difficult for the network administrator to make adequate changes to improve the user experience for the network customers. However, several previous works present tools that they have used to analyze the network traffic such as Fing, nPerf, Speedtest, Netflow, OONI probe etc. but these have several limitations which are among others the unavailability or lack of publication, the lack of a real view of the quality of the traffic that the client receives and the lack of automatic scheduling of measurements. In this work, we have created a native android application that allows us to show metrics such as latency, packet loss, jitter, download speed and upload speed. However, this tool can also be used for mobile operators to evaluate the network availability in a specific area and thus make a case. With our tool, we were able to deduce that although the test results are approximately the same as those of existing tools, the amount of data used is much lower than that used by these other tools. On average, an amount of data of 50.4 MB can be used.