Firefox OS/Research

On this page, we will list related work (published research papers and other projects) that might be of interest either as something to integrate within Firefox OS, or that we can build off of for Firefox OS related research projects.

Network Measurement

The MobiPerf project

Related: Mobilyzer An Android application running in the background periodically measures a wide range of performance characteristics of the mobile and wireless network. Data is then anonymized and published in an open data set.

Cross-layer application profiling

ARO: pdf

RRC state analysis

A Close Examination of Performance and Power Characteristics of 4G LTE Networks pdf

This is done in a device-agnostic way with MobiPerf. Mobiperf infers the impact of RRC states on user-perceived latencies, rather than the RRC state changes themselves. In particular, this allows bad transition delays to be logged.

pdf On certain Android devices it is possible to receive control-plane messages corresponding to RRC states. This is a tool to log this control-plane data and determine how it interacts with data-plane events in order to affect user-perceived performance.

New network protocols

TCP for Cellular Networks

An In-depth Study of LTE: Effect of Network Protocol and Application Behavior on Performance pdf Analyzing performance of TCP and applications on LTE network from a dataset captured at an operational LTE network in US

MultiPath TCP

MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) leverages multiple network interfaces to establish multiple TCP connections. It is standardized by RFC 6824 (experimental) and is implemented in Linux (pdf). There are a few research papers looking at the performance of MPTCP in general or on mobile platforms.

A Measurement-based Study of MultiPath TCP Performance over Wireless Networks pdf

Exploring Mobile/WiFi Handover with Multipath TCP pdf

Network Performance and Battery Optimization

Power Characterization and Optimization

TOP: Tail Optimization Protocol for Cellular Radio Resource Allocation pdf leveraging fast dormancy to reduce tail energy

RadioProphet: Intelligent Radio Resource Deallocation for Cellular Networks pdf Eliminate tail times by predicting when the network will be idle

PowerTutor: a diagnostic tool for analyzing system and app power usage with automated power model construction and accurate power estimation from system activities (within 5% of actual values). It has power breakdown for different apps and major system components.

Networking Traffic Scheduling

Screen-Off Traffic Characterization and Optimization in 3G/4G Networks pdf

Caching

Web caching on smartphones: ideal vs reality pdf

Redundant network transfers on mobile phones are a huge problem. Even just ensuring caching is correctly implemented makes a large difference.

How to Reduce Smartphone Traffic Volume by 30%? pdf

By adding in better redundancy elimination

Security

User-Driven Access Control

A more natural way of granting application permissions: (Roesner et al) Build permission granting into normal user application workflow patterns with access control gadgets. Protected UI gadgets allow users to naturally give access to e.g. the camera by pressing a button with a camera on it.

Side Channel Attack Research (Shared Public Resource Privacy Leakage)

Study user privacy leakage from application/system public accessible resources. For FireFox OS, we can study the API design to find out possible leakage interfaces.

Malware/Spyware Detection

Use systematical approaches to ensure a secure environment of the application market. We can use program analysis methods to statically or dynamically detect possible malware/spyware.

Possible Privilege Escalation Problems

Inter-component communication via Intent in Android produces tons of privilege escalation attacks, such as permission re-delegation, component hijacking, etc. It would be interesting to see whether the web activity in Firefox OS, the equivalence of Intent, can enable the same attacks. If so, it is a good chance to build a defense system at this early age of B2G OS.