A First Look at Traffic on Smartphones
Hossein Falaki
Dimitrios Lymberopoulos
Ratul Mahajan
Srikanth Kandula
Deborah Estrin
Exponential growth in mobile traffic
http://www.readwriteweb.com
CISCO VNI 2010
ratul | IMC | Nov 2010
http://www.totaltele.com
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Two ways to understand
smartphone traffic
2. Capture on
the devices
ratul | IMC | Nov 2010
1. Capture at a link
in the network
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Preliminary findings
Browsing, email, media, and maps dominate
traffic
Small connection sizes lead to high overhead
Throughput is bottlenecked by path loss and
socket buffers at servers
Tuning 3G radio timeout can significantly reduce
power use with minimal performance impact
ratul | IMC | Nov 2010
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Datasets in our study
Dataset1
Dataset2
# users
10
33
Platform
8 WM6,
2 Android
Android
Traffic granularity
Packet-level
App-level
Duration (days/user)
26-84
49-147
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Traffic exchanged per day
% of
users
(CDF)
MB per day
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Traffic composition
Bytes (%)
Browsing
58.0
Media
10.8
Messaging (email, IM)
10.3
Maps
8.5
System
5.8
Social networking
4.2
Games
0.4
Productivity
0.2
Other
1.8
[Dataset2]
ratul | IMC | Nov 2010
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Transfer sizes are small
% of
transfers
(CDF)
Transfer size (KB)
[Dataset1]
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Lower-layer protocols have high overhead
% of
xfers
(CDF)
% of
xfers
(CDF)
Handshake overhead (% of time)
Header overhead (% of bytes)
[Dataset1]
[Dataset1]
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Traffic throughput is low
% of
xfers
(CDF)
Throughput (kbps)
[Connections in Dataset1 with 10+ data packets in a direction]
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Throughput bottlenecks
Packet loss
Sender window
Receiver window
Bandwidth
Transport
Application
Unknown
Uplink Downlink
(%)
(%)
81.0
61.5
4.1
27.4
6.8
3.4
5.1
2.9
0.7
0.0
0.0
0.0
2.4
4.8
[Connections in Dataset1 with 50+ data packets in a direction]
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Conclusions
Capturing traffic on smartphones provides a
rich, detailed view of device traffic
Findings from our preliminary analysis
•
•
•
•
Browsing, email, media, and maps dominate traffic
Small transfer sizes lead to high overhead
Throughput is limited by loss and socket buffers
Judicious radio timeouts can cut power consumption
ratul | IMC | Nov 2010
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