Sensing the Internet through crowdsourcing

Portolan is a crowdsourcing-based system aimed at building an annotated graph of the Internet: the smartphones of participating volunteers are used as mobile monitors to collect measures about the network that surrounds them, then results are conveyed on a central server where they are aggregated. Thus, differently from all the other Internet monitoring systems, which are based on fixed infrastructure, Portolan rely on a multitude of mobile sensing nodes. While this paves the way to the opportunity of having detailed and geo-referenced measures, the design of the systems has to take into account additional difficulties such as scalability, coordination and smartphones' reachability. Besides describing the Portolan's architecture, this paper also shows some preliminary results that confirm the validity of the proposed approach.