Introduction
Topher White (son of Bebo White) is convinced that we/he could install the PingER software on the Android phone/OS. He literally has 100's of them that have been donated to his project. The delays will be very different. It will be fascinating to try and understand what parameters determine the delays and losses, quantify the information and compare with wired MAs. Initially the phones would be stationary and use WiFi (thus eliminating roving effects, and cell phone coverage). The power use and availability of smartphones could make it a very interesting platform for PingER.
Measurement Agent
It is basically a cheap, small, low power PingER Measurement Agent (MA) at a fixed location. A difference, however, is that the Android MA would probably not have a fixed wired connection to the network, rather communicating by wireless presumably to some local WiFi router. If the ePingER is to move araound it will need to add its location (lat/long) to the data records. This will need to be done in a way that is backward compatible (i.e. the additional can be easily filtered out and ignored by existing applications.
Power
Smart phones are very energy efficient because they are designed to run on a battery for a long period of time. For a smartphone battery with 1650mAh and a voltage of 3.7V (typical cell phone battery voltage 3-5V) the Wattage for an 8 hour talk time on 3G is 0.76 W.
Assuming the smartphone is charged once a day from 0% to 100% a Galaxy SIII: consumed 12.3 watt-hours to charge, taking 2 hours and 26 minutes, the maximum wattage was 6.6 watts, with an average of approximately 5.0 W.
According to measurements from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the average cell phone draws 3.68 watts of power from the outlet while it's charging and 2.24 watts when charged.
One can buy off the shelf solar cell phone chargers, for example the SolPro that in direct sunlight can re-charge its battery (a Lithium-Polymer battery with safety circuitry and capacity of 4500mAh enough to keep a smartphone going all day) in 4.5 hours.
Accessing the MA data
This is saved in Firebase. Go to https://firebase.google.com/ enter the Google account pingeramity123@gmail.com plus the password (Les has the password). Then Go to console, then choose one of the documents (e.g. pinger-7db5c). To the left is a column with items such as Authentication and Database.
- Under Authentication +919999999999 is the guest access.
- The Database provides access to the data, click on ping and the individual records show up. Click on + signs to open each record.
Firebase pricing
Firebase provides two plans to choose from. The one which we are currently on is called the Spark Plan. It is a free plan that provides generous data limits. As our application grows we would need to adopt the Blaze plan. The blaze plan is a “Pay as you go” plan as indicated on the website. It is a post billing service which means that you get billed for your usage at the end of the month.
Our application currently uses two services of Firebase - Authentication and Realtime database. For Authentication, according to the spark plan, we are allowed 10 000 phone verifications for numbers from the US, India and Canada and another 10 000 phone verifications from all other countries. If our application exceeds this amount we would have to pay $0.01 per verification for all phone numbers from India, the US and Canada and $0.06 per verification for numbers from all the other countries.
Details for various pricing services along with a blaze plan calculator is provided on Firebase’s website:
Relevant papers
An analysis of power consumption in a smartphone, A. Carrol and G. Heiser, 2009
Meetings
Discussion on porting ePingER to Android phone, March 2016 with Sara Massood.
Implementation
PingER on Android phøne two methods
ePinger on Android native, functional prototype
Extension of the PingER project onto Mobile Devices using Android Applications, paper from Amity University Confluence conference January 10, 2019
Instructions from Aayush to load the application are at ePingER Functional prototype