MobileInsight enables below-IP, fine-grained mobile network analytics on end device. It is a cross-platform package for mobile network monitoring and analysis, originally developed by researchers at UCLA Wireless Networking Group (WiNG) and Purdue Peng Group, licensed under Apache Licence 2.0.

MobileInsight provides low-level monitors for mobile network, and extensible event-driven analyzers for major cellular protocols, such as radio resource control (RRC), mobility management (EMM), and session management (ESM). You can also define your own analyzers for customized usage.

Using MobileInsight, users can declare a monitor to track the network status and call ananlyzer for online/offline analysis. See overview on how this works, and examples on how to use it.

Currently MobileInsight supports installation on macOS and Ubuntu/Debian systems. To install it on Windows, please use our all-in-one virtual machine from mobileinsight-dev.

First install latest Python 2.7, then download MobileInsight from the release page:

tar -zxvf mobileinsight-3.0.tar.gz
cd mobileinsight-3.0

Next, run installation script (but do not execute with root priviledge!):

./install-macos.sh (macOS)
./install-ubuntu.sh (Ubuntu)

The install script will install MobileInsight package to your PYTHONPATH, install MobileInsight GUI to /usr/local/bin/mi-gui, and run an offline analysis example at the end.

MobileInsight builds on top of pyserial and crcmod, which can be installed using pip:

pip install pyserial
pip install crcmod

The GUI of MobileInsight requires matplotlib and wxPython. matplotlib can be installed via pip:

pip install matplotlib

wxPython can be installed using Homebrew (macOS) or apt-get (Ubuntu).

brew install wxpython (macOS)
apt-get install python-wxgtk3.0 (Ubuntu)

Old version of mobileInsight-core may have installed Wireshark and Glib libraries under the /usr/lib folder. The installation script will auto handle the uninstallation of the old version. If you encounter issues, you may execute the uninstallation script manually to remove them. Please run the uninstallation script with root priviledge to perform proper clean up.

sudo ./uninstall.sh

We love pull requests and discussing novel ideas. You can open issues here to report bugs. Feel free to improve MobileInsight and become a collaborator if you are interested.

The following Slack group is used exclusively for discussions about developing the MobileInsight and its sister projects:

• Dev Slack Group: https://mobileinsight-dev.slack.com (join via this link)
• Email: [email protected]

For other advanced topics, please refer to the wiki and the MobileInsight website.