Traffic Characterization of Instant Messaging Apps: A Campus-Level View

Over the past decade, Instant Messaging (IM) apps have become an extremely popular tool for billions of people to communicate online. In this paper, we use a combination of active and passive measurement techniques to study one week of IM app traffic on a large campus edge network. Despite the challenges of end-to-end encryption, user privacy, NAT, DHCP, and high traffic volumes, we identify the key characteristics of four popular IM apps: Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, and WeChat. The main observations from our study indicate a rich ecosystem of IM apps, many of which exhibit strong diurnal patterns, complex user interactions, and heavy-tailed distributions for connection durations and transfer sizes. Collectively, these four IM apps contribute about 650 GB of daily traffic volume on our campus network.