The Internet is an indispensable part of society today, but many of the details about how well it operates are poorly understood. This project will support and enhance the Seattle community testbed, one of the tools supporting experimentation for measuring and understanding the Internet. The Seattle testbed allows researchers the ability to safely run experiments on real user devices and networks and gives experimenters access to thousands of devices around the world. End users must decide to 'opt-in' by installing the Seattle software on their tablet, smartphone, or other computing device to participate in Seattle. Via enhancements to the Seattle platform, the project will improve the ability of researchers to understand smartphone and future network environments as they exist in the Internet today, so that they may improve the Internet and design better networks in the future.
This project will support the continued growth and development of the Seattle Testbed. The programming APIs of the Seattle sandbox will be enhanced to add support for IPv6, reading device sensors, and multi-homing. It will also improve support for NAT traversal, mobility, and similar code on the platform. Several scalability and stability issues with the platform will be addressed, including automated build testing and similar practices. The project will also more explicitly expose the community-driven development model at the project's core to make it easier for outside groups to participate in Seattle development and to also address the long-term sustainability of the Seattle code-base.
