Comiqual: collaborative measurement of internet quality

With the continuous growth of both fixed and mobile Internet usage, measuring the Internet QoS (quality of service) becomes of vital interest for all involved Internet stakeholders, mainly consumers, operators, and regulators. In this paper, we describe in detail, Comiqual (collaborative measurement of Internet quality), a crowd-sourced large-scale Internet measurement platform that coordinates and collects measurements from measurement agents (MAs) installed on fixed and mobile end user devices. Although the initial and main target of Comiqual is Lebanon, the platform is generically designed to measure the Internet access quality from the user’s perspective anywhere on the globe. The MAs that execute mainly active measurements are jointly controlled by users and by a measurement center (MC); the latter sends measurement instructions to MAs and collects the measurement results. The communication protocol between MC and MAs uses JSON messages that are exchanged via HTTP through REST calls and secured by HTTPS. Measurement results could be openly accessed in a raw format or viewed as an aggregation via a Google map. Moreover, an online statistical tool allows user-defined statistics computation and visualization. All these features combined with the flexibility of the platform management are the main drivers that will allow Comiqual to reach its ultimate goal, which is to create a collaborative, neutral, and transparent observatory of the Internet.