Stunner: A smart phone trace for developing decentralized edge systems

Abstract

Conducting research into edge and fog computing often involves experimenting with actual deployments, which is costly and time-consuming, so we need to rely on realistic simulations at least in the early phases of research. To be able to do so we need to collect real data that allows us to perform trace-based simulation and to extract crucial statistics. To achieve this for the domain of distributed smartphone applications, for many years we have been collecting data via smartphones concerning NAT type, the availability of WiFi and cellular networks, the battery level, and many more attributes. Recently, we enhanced our data collecting Android app Stunner by taking actual P2P measurements. Here, we outline our data collection method and the technical details, including some challenges we faced with data cleansing. We present a preliminary set of statistics based on the data for illustration. We also make our new database freely available for research purposes.