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.