Cellular smartphone traffic and user behavior analysis

Recent emergence of smartphone applications have led to explosive traffic growth in cellular networks. Understanding the traffic characteristics and user behaviors in cellular data networks becomes critical in the rapidly evolving market. Statistics show that Android and iOS are two leading smartphone operating systems and Windows Phone operating system is catching up fast in the global smartphone market share. This paper characterizes mobile Internet traffic generated by Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms devices. We also explore and compare user behaviors of these three platforms from two aspects: traffic dynamics and user applications. This study was conducted based on the traffic data collected from a major cellular operator´s network covering more than two million users. The platform of a mobile device is identified based on HTTP signatures. Our analysis of this big data set is crucial for improving user experience and future smartphone application design.