MobileInsight 2.0 Released

MobileInsight is a research project that I am doing at UCLA. It aims to enable end devices (our cellphones) to gain insights of 3G/4G cellular networks. From the product perspective, it is a freely available community tool to monitor and analysis the mobile networks. The MobileInsight 1.0 was release last summer, back then we only have the desktop version with few protocol support.

I joined this project shortly after MobileInsight 1.0 was released, and has been working on it since then. In the current MobileInsight 2.0, we brought tremendous number of new features. One most eye-catching feature, may be the mobile version of MobileInsight. With such convinient and extensible mobile platform, cellular event logging and analysis has never been easier. The core of the mobile version of MobileInsight is the same as the desktop version. The only difference is that it is compiled in a special way to run on Android (for now, we are working to support iOS in future release!).

Given that such a great tool can facilitate cellular network operation and related research, we would love to make it publicly available. That is why we started to prepare the code release since the beginning of this quarter at UCLA (because there is no major deadlines in this period, thank goodness). However, the code release was way more complex than I thought at first. Though it is not really a bumpy ride, but definitely it is NOT easy! It took us almost one whole week to finish the code testing, packing, preparing libraries for different platforms and architectures. What’s more, there are documentation, and mobile version compilation… Overwhelmingly too much tasks for me and Yuanjie to finish in one week.

Yet we survived. I am telling you this story. So really I think this process is demanding but very rewarding as well. I already feel more confidence for our future version release. And we do not release this tool today on purpose, really. (Imaging you tell someone on April 1st that you won a lottery and getting the ``are you kidding me’’ face) We just want to make it available to the industry and research communities as soon as possible.

So, in the end: you are welcomed to try MobileInsight! See our code release site here. Please also consider share your valuable opinions and/or bug reports to us. We are constantly improving this tool and want to get community involved in it as well. You know how to reach us. ; )