[atlas] Exploring the Idea of RIPE Atlas Virtual Probes

well, if you constrain yourself to workalike of physical probes, you will
not get satisfactory results...

yes, mobile networks and mobile phones are unreliable. this doesn't make
them less interesting to researchers and professionals - on the contrary.
you will simply have to deal with the limitations. a good way to deal with
limitations is by having access to more such probes. in particular, since
mobiles are (well...) mobile, reproducibility is next to impossible and
cannot be a design goal for this class of measurements. still OK for many
uses.

this also means that such probes will probably be allowed by iOS to check
for requested measurements and wake up only periodically, e.g. by push
notification via the notification service, and thus pass app review. If
there is a legitimate need and use for an app, you can usually pass app
review.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Micha Bailey <michabailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I would imagine that having probe apps on mobile devices would be very
> impractical in terms of battery usage, unreliable connections, the device
> itself not being on/connected 24/7, etc.
> In addition, I believe it would not be possible on iOS. You can't really
> have an app like this running full-time in the background. Only certain
> categories of apps are allowed to do this (e.g. GPS turn-by-turn navigation
> and audio players), and I can't imagine anything like an Atlas Probe will
> make it through App Review.
>
>
> On Tuesday, December 29, 2015, Colin Johnston <colinj at mx5.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> iphone virtual app probe would be great as well :)
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On 29 Dec 2015, at 19:49, Gil Bahat <gil at magisto.com> wrote:
>>
>> We also support the idea of expanding the network. If it's done in a
>> modular fashion, users can pick their desired veracity levels to the task
>> at hand. we'd like to see more information on mobile data as network uses
>> shift a lot to mobile and (for various reasons) it's very hard to get
>> current probes on such networks and ultimately having an ATLAS-like app
>> might be the only realistic way to go about it.
>>
>> integration into open source platforms such as openwrt or the turris
>> omnia would also be most welcome.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Gil Bahat,
>> DevOps and Network Engineer,
>> Magisto Ltd.
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 8:12 PM, Wilfried Woeber <woeber at cc.univie.ac.at>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Atlas Community!
>>>
>>> On 2015-12-21 12:02, Vesna Manojlovic wrote:
>>> > Dear colleagues,
>>> >
>>> > Some of you have asked about Virtual Probes on this list.
>>>
>>> Indeed :-)
>>>
>>> > Although we don't plan to make virtual probes available in 2016,
>>> > we do plan to investigate this idea and develop some prototypes.
>>>
>>> Fair enough.
>>>
>>> > Please find more details on RIPE Labs:
>>>
>>> I'll try to put my thoughts into some well-structured words, over there.
>>> I hope to succeed, but no premature promises yet...
>>>
>>> >
>>> https://labs.ripe.net/Members/suzanne_taylor_muzzin/exploring-the-idea-of-ripe-atlas-virtual-probes
>>> >
>>> > Kind regards,
>>> > Vesna Manojlovic
>>> > RIPE NCC
>>>
>>> All the best for (2015)++
>>> Wilfried
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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