SMOTE: Scalable Mobile Services Testing and Evaluation Infrastructure

In today's world, people's reliance on smart phones and mobile devices has been growing at a phenomenal rate. In addition, it is a fair prediction that the future mobile devices are going to be more sophisticated with constantly increasing data and bandwidth demands. Even with the proliferation of 3G/4G wireless networks, these demands need to be handled more efficiently. It is important for a mobile service provider to maintain a good Quality of Experience (QoE) and a superior Quality of Service (QoS) to their users at all times. One way to achieve a superior QoS, is for the network to have usage information from each device and to take pro-active decisions that match the demands from the users. This research aims at identifying and monitoring the key performance indicators affecting QoE and QoS for the mobile network. For the core mobile network, a better understanding of its user's usage pattern is the key to predict perceived future activity with a greater accuracy. This thesis presents a Scalable Mobile Services Testing and Evaluation Infrastructure (SMOTE) which allows developers and network providers to perform experiments and collect performance data. A novel system architecture is proposed, designed, implemented and evaluated as a part of this research. SMOTE could discover a cloud of mobile devices, control them remotely, simulate user actions and collect results from the simulation runs. Experiments are performed using the system to test its scalability, correctness, consistency and the results are documented