Skip to main content

Comprehensive Mobile Traffic Characterization Based on a Large-Scale Mobile Traffic Dataset

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Network and System Security (NSS 2022)

Abstract

Mobile traffic has accounted for a principal part of network traffic with the ways of accessing the Internet shifting to mobile devices. Subsequently, mobile traffic analysis becomes the focus of research. However, there is a lack of studies on mobile traffic characterization, while the traffic characteristics are important for obtaining a clear understanding of mobile networks. To make up for this research gap, this paper provides a comprehensive overview and characterization of current mobile application traffic. The properties of mobile traffic are described from four perspectives based on a large-scale mobile traffic dataset, including basic information (the destination IP, the destination Port, and the protocol), domain name usage, HTTP/TLS protocol usage, and the traffic flow. Besides, the properties of mobile traffic shown by different application categories are also analyzed simultaneously. Finally, a discussion is provided on how the presented observations work on various traffic analysis tasks in mobile networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Statista Research Department. Mobile app usage - Statistics & Facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/1002/mobile-app-usage/

  2. Buildfire. Mobile app Download Statistics & Usage Statistics (2021) . https://buildfire.com/app-statistics/

  3. First Site Guide. Mobile Web Traffic Stats and Facts in 2021. https://firstsiteguide.com/mobile-traffic-stats/

  4. Conti, M., Li, Q.Q., Maragno, A., Spolaor, R.: The dark side(-channel) of mobile devices: a survey on network traffic analysis. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor. 20(4), 2658–2713 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2018.2843533

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Trinh, H.D., Bui, N., Widmer, J., Giupponi, L., Dini, P.: Analysis and modeling of mobile traffic using real traces. In: IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications, pp. 1–6 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/PIMRC.2017.8292200

  6. Shi, H., Li, Y.: Discovering periodic patterns for large scale mobile traffic data: method and applications. IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 17(10), 2266–2278 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2018.2799945

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Fang, C., Liu, J., Lei, Z.: Fine-grained HTTP web traffic analysis based on large-scale mobile datasets. IEEE Access 4, 4364–4373 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2597538

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Wang, R., Liu, Z., Cai, Y., Tang, D., Yang, J., Yang, Z.: Benchmark data for mobile app traffic research. In: 15th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, pp. 402–411 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3286978.3287000

  9. Aceto, G., Ciuonzo, D., Montieri, A., Persico, V., Pescape, A.: MIRAGE: mobile-app traffic capture and ground-truth creation. In: International Conference on Computing, Communications and Security, pp. 1–8 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/CCCS.2019.8888137

  10. Rezaei, S., Kroencke, B., Liu, X.: Large-scale mobile app identification using deep learning. IEEE Access 8, 348–362 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Sengupta, S., Ganguly, N., De, P., Chakraborty, S.: Exploiting diversity in android TLS implementations for mobile app traffic classification. In: World Wide Web Conference, pp. 1657–1668 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313738

  12. Chen, Y., Zang, T., Zhang, Y., Zhou, Y., Wang, Y.: Rethinking encrypted traffic classification: a multi-attribute associated fingerprint approach. In: IEEE 27th International Conference on Network Protocols, pp. 1–11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP.2019.8888043

  13. Wang, X., Chen, S., Jinshu, S.: Real network traffic collection and deep learning for mobile app identification. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2020, 1–14 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/4707909

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. NUDT_MobileTraffic. https://github.com/Abby-ZS/NUDT_MobileTraffic

  15. Aceto, G., Ciuonzo, D., Montieri, A., Pescape, A.: Mobile encrypted traffic classification using deep learning: experimental evaluation, lessons learned, and challenges. IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag. 16(2), 445–458 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2019.2899085

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Transport Layer Security (TLS) Parameters. https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-parameters.xhtml#tls-parameters-4

  17. Bub, D., Hartmann, L., Bozakov, Z., Wendzel, S.: Towards passive identification of aged android devices in the home network. In: Proceedings of the 2022 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference, pp. 17–20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1145/3528580.3528584

  18. Almashhadani, A.O., Kaiiali, M., Carlin, D., Sezer, S.: MaldomDetection: a system for detecting algorithmically generated domain names with machine learning. Comput. Secur. 93(2020), 1–13 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shuhui Chen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Appendix A

Appendix A

Table 6 provides the cipher suites mentioned in this paper.

Table 6. The cipher suites look up table.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Zhao, S., Zhong, J., Chen, S., Liang, J. (2022). Comprehensive Mobile Traffic Characterization Based on a Large-Scale Mobile Traffic Dataset. In: Yuan, X., Bai, G., Alcaraz, C., Majumdar, S. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13787. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23020-2_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23020-2_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-23019-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-23020-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics