The importance of mobile computing is rapidly increasing but the field is held back from its potential by the difficulty of evaluating new ideas. The effectiveness of mobile computing systems depends on variable network, application, and user behaviors, many of which are only visible in large-scale systems. To enable transformative research on mobile computing and related disciplines, this project creates a global-scale live laboratory composed of mobile devices, networks, and their users that will support the validation of research ideas. This live laboratory, referred to as MobiLab, makes two key contributions: (1) it provides an online repository of real-time and archived mobile user data, including vital information such as location-specific network conditions, per-application energy usage, and user behavior and (2) through a set of software libraries and tools, it simplifies the tasks of developing, deploying and evaluating research applications. Instead of re-building applications to monitor network, application, mobile system, and user behavior, researchers can gather information online from MobiLab tools via easy-to-use application programming interfaces (APIs). The target communities include researchers in several disciplines, such as mobile systems and networks, embedded systems, network security, mobile data privacy, and social networking. MobiLab is suitable for both undergraduate lab-intensive introductory courses as well as graduate-level courses that expose students to mobile computing, distributed computer system design, and distributed sensing. MobiLab will also have a lasting impact on the research community by providing a central repository for mobile system research data, software artifacts created by the community, and results based on the data.
