Background Traffic Analysis for Social Media Applications on Smartphones

Smart phones represent one of the fastest growing markets, providing significant software improvements every few months. Growth in Social media applications (Face book, Skype, QQ) running on smart phones lead to explosive growth in traffic over cellular networks and of course taxing on the smart phones battery, among the different types of traffic, background traffic keeps exchanging data with corresponding server, even when the user is not actively using the application. This work attempts to study the characteristic of these applications when they are running without user intervention. Since the diverse range of data characteristics is assumed to be causing drain in User Equipment (UE) battery and overhead in NW signaling, the analysis will help in developing appropriate new power saving mechanisms in future releases of cellular networks.