Dear Colleague, The University of Pisa and IIT, an Institute of the Italian National Research Council, have designed and developed a crowdsourcing-based system, named PORTOLAN, which initially employed smartphones as mobile monitors probing the Internet. The aim of PORTOLAN is to enhance the current topology of the Internet at the Autonomous System level of abstraction - all with the contribution of volunteers. Find out more on our website (http://portolan.iet.unipi.it).
Portolan was initially deployed in 2012 and since then it has been available on smartphone clients running Android. In order to increase the number of users, Portolan IS NOW available for desktop operating systems Linux, Windows and OS X. In this way we hope to obtain a more precise Internet structure with respect to the one now available. PORTOLAN works in the background, it is designed not to interfere in any way with users' activities and does not affect the smartphone/desktop's overall performance. In order to motivate users to contribute to the PORTOLAN project, we have added several services, which include diagnostic network tools (such as Ping, Paris Traceroute with Multipath Detection Algorithm, Maximum Throughput achievable along a path, etc.) and coverage measurement tools (available on smartphones only). All the tools are totally under the user's control. Data collected by these tools are stored in our server located in Pisa, in a completely anonymous way. The PORTOLAN component that runs on Android smartphones can be downloaded by users from Google play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.unipi.iet.portolan.tracero ute). The PORTOLAN component for desktop, available for Windows 7/8, Linux and OS X, can be downloaded at our website http://portolan.iet.unipi.it/download. The success of Portolan depends upon the number of users who join the experiment. Feel free to share this message with your colleagues students and friends!. Many thanks in advance for your cooperation. All the best, Luciano On behalf of the Portolan Development Team ------------------------------------------------ Prof. Luciano Lenzini Associate Researcher IIT/CNR [email protected] Former Full Professor Department of Information Engineering School of Engineering University of Pisa, Italy http://www.iet.unipi.it/~lenzini and Research Director CNUCE/CNR
