PEPA PEriodic PAssive Ping: Ca

PEPA PEriodic PAssive Ping is a passive monitoring application of the quality of your Internet. It runs every 15 minutes, does not consume mobile data and obtains information similar to that of the "Ping" tool.

Each execution lasts 1 minute, where the application is in charge of transferring all the data flow from the established Internet connections.

For this, it simulates a connection to a VPN server. In this way, Android leaves PEPA the task of sending and receiving all the data corresponding to your normal Internet traffic. The application does NOT inspect data traffic, which is mostly encrypted and cannot be decrypted. Only statistical data is collected from established Internet connections.

- Connection start time
- Connection termination time
- Connection type (TCP or UDP)
- Amount of bytes sent / received
- Destination of the traffic (IP and destination port)

In addition, information is also collected regarding the quality of the connection ("Ping" type)
- Latency (minimum, average and variance)
- Amount of packages lost.

In parallel to each execution, the application collects "environmental data", which allows contextualizing the analysis of quality of service of the mobile Internet. These data include:
- RAM memory used / total
- Geographical location (lat / lon)
- User speed
- Mobile phone company
- If the connection is WiFi: Signal strength, frequency band
- If the connection is mobile: signal strength, technology (LTE, UMTS, etc), antenna IDs.

Privacy & Security:

The application does not collect information that can help reveal the identity of a user, such as hardware identifiers (IMEI, SIM ID, MAC address) or public IP. To identify an instance of the application, a "universal instance identifier" (UUID) is used, following the recommendation of Android.

All the data collected is sent to one of the servers of NIC Chile Research Labs, in a secure way (HTTPS protocol). The data will be used solely by researchers at NIC Labs and for research purposes, primarily to analyze mobile Internet usage and quality of service based on the context of the device.

Disclaimers:

Android is likely to notice that the app is battery-intensive. However, the main work of the application lies in handling the different internet connections (work that the device does anyway, whether the application is activated or not).

Android is likely to show that the app has high network usage. This is because normal traffic passes through the app before going to and from the internet (while the app is running), so it does not represent a real increase in data usage. The only extra traffic generated by the application is to send the collected data to the NIC Chile Research Labs server, which is done by default only if there is a Wi-Fi connection (unless the user allows sending with mobile data).