A First Look at Traffic on Smartphones

1. A First Look at Traffic on Smartphones Hossein Falaki Dimitrios Lymberopoulos Ratul Mahajan Srikanth Kandula Deborah Estrin

2. Exponential growth in mobile traffic http://www.readwriteweb.com http://www.totaltele.com CISCO VNI 2010

3. Two ways to understand smartphone traffic 1. Capture at a link in the network 2. Capture on the devices

4. 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 reducepower use with minimal performance impact

5. Datasets in our study

6. Traffic exchanged per day % ofusers(CDF) MB per day

7. Traffic composition [Dataset2]

8. Transfer sizes are small % of transfers (CDF) Transfer size (KB) [Dataset1]

9. Lower-layer protocols have high overhead % ofxfers(CDF) % ofxfers(CDF) Handshake overhead (% of time) Headeroverhead (% of bytes) [Dataset1] [Dataset1]

10. Traffic throughput is low % ofxfers(CDF) Throughput (kbps) [Connections in Dataset1 with 10+ data packets in a direction]

11. Throughput bottlenecks [Connections in Dataset1 with 50+ data packets in a direction]

12. 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