An overview of mobile device network traffic and network interface usage patterns

Abstract

In this paper, we present and evaluate the outcomes of a measurement study amongst Android mobile device users, who volunteered their device-level network activity data through a newly developed mobile application in January 2013. We evaluate the submitted data in two hour time intervals with respect to device-level network traffic amounts, application network activity times, and data distribution (as measure of connectivity) between mobile (cellular) and wireless LAN networks. We find fairly homogeneous values with low levels of autocorrelation or long range dependence for the device-level amounts of data, but an indication for self-similarity for the summed application network usage times, which are positively correlated. In addition, we observe that the average distribution for cellular interface usage exhibits clear patterns for the day of the week as well as the time of the day. The combination of these findings can find direct utilization in future mobile device utilization modeling efforts.