CobCel: Distributed and Collaborative Sensing of Cellular Phone Coverage Using Google Android

摘要

This paper presents CobCel,a prototype Android application for measuring, in a distributed and collaborative manner, the cellular coverage as perceived by the users of mobile devices. Unlike specialized cellular coverage tests, CobCel samples the received signal strength indication (RSSI) using smartphones operated by their own users. The sensed RSSI is supplied with the geographical location of the device, and this supplemented information is next transmitted to a server which aggregates the collaboratively sensed data and displays a historical cellular coverage map as perceived by the cellphone users. Data collected by CobCel is intended to be used not only to report cellular coverage, but also to create open-source databases of cellular coverage and end-users mobility patterns. Further, it has been noticed after analyzing the data that real-world RSSI samples seems to follow a heavy-tail law instead of the chi-squared distribution usually assumed in theory.