An investigation into traffic analysis for diverse data applications on smartphones

Abstract

Present day smartphones like iPhone and Andriod based phones have lead to explosive growth in traffic over cellular networks. The growth has occurred both in volume and diversity in terms of traffic characteristics. Among the different types of traffic, there is prominent increase in background type of data due to popularity of applications like Facebook, Skype, Email clients etc which keeps exchanging data with corresponding server, even when the user is not actively using the application. In order to save power consumption of smart phones and for optimal allocation of resources to deserving phones in network by minimum possible signaling traffic, 3GPP LTE specifications have defined mechanisms like connected mode DRX (Discontinuous Reception) which offers two stage of sleep in form of long & short DRX. Since such diverse type of applications are running in smartphone, this work attempts to investigate traffic characteristics of popular applications in Andriod based smartphones. Due to various reasons, such applications, keep consuming precious bandwidth and battery even when not in active use. Main emphasis is thus provided to study the characteristic of these applications when they are running without user intervention. Since, the diverse range of data characteristics is assumed to be causing drain in User Equipment (UE) battery and overhead in NW signaling, we expect that this investigation would help in developing appropriate new power saving mechanisms in future releases of cellular networks.