Performance Monitoring and Analysis of Wireless Communication Protocols for Mobile Devices

Fixed to mobile convergence is a very promising field due to the success in recent years of mobile devices such as smart phones and PDAs. A wide variety of wireless technologies ranging from Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Wimax, to GPRS, UMTS and its later releases, allow ubiquitous connectivity. Roaming between different access technologies will be an important area of activity. As a result of the heterogeneity of radio access technologies, there is a growing trend to use IP as underlying protocol. Analysing the behaviour of IP based protocols in this environment is necessary to optimize its performance. In this paper we present the development of a new tool which aims to capture and analyze traffic from different protocols and access technologies in existing mobile devices. In order to get the best results we propose using off-the-shelf mobile phones as instruments to obtain an accurate perception of the service performance offered to mobile users.