Portolan network tools

Portolan is a a crowdsourcing-based system that uses smartphones as mobile measuring elements. Portolan aims at discovering the topology and the structure of the Internet and building signal coverage maps, with the contribution of volunteers.

In order to incentivize users to contribute to the Portolan project, the app offers to the users several diagnostic network tools:
- Ping
- Traceroute (with Multipath Detection Algorithm)
- AS (Autonomous System) path
- signal measurement
- maximum available throughput of your connection
- it verifies if your Internet Service Provider limits BitTorrent traffic.

These tools are totally under user's control. Data collected by these tools is available to the user and is stored in
our servers, in a completely anonymous way.

This app sometimes runs background traceroute measurements and signal strength measurements. When your smartphone is not connected to a WiFi network the Internet mapping activity generates an average traffic rate never higher than 2 MB/day. The impact of this activity on the battery consumption is negligible. Signal coverage measurements are completely costless in terms of energy or bandwidth, as the Portolan app passively collects signal strength samples only when other apps use the GPS. The application stops its background activity when the battery level decreases under 20%. The app does not send any personal data to our servers, and sends only the measurements results. Thus, it is not possible for us to connect measurements to the device that performed them. Finally, the user can monitor the amount of resources used by our application whenever he/she wants.