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Periodic transfers in mobile applications: network-wide origin, impact, and optimization

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Cellular networks employ a specific radio resource management policy distinguishing them from wired and Wi-Fi networks. A lack of awareness of this important mechanism potentially leads to resource-inefficient mobile applications. We perform the first network-wide, large-scale investigation of a particular type of application traffic pattern called periodic transfers where a handset periodically exchanges some data with a remote server every t seconds. Using packet traces containing 1.5 billion packets collected from a commercial cellular carrier, we found that periodic transfers are very prevalent in today's smartphone traffic. However, they are extremely resource-inefficient for both the network and end-user devices even though they predominantly generate very little traffic. This somewhat counter-intuitive behavior is a direct consequence of the adverse interaction between such periodic transfer patterns and the cellular network radio resource management policy. For example, for popular smartphone applications such as Facebook, periodic transfers account for only 1.7% of the overall traffic volume but contribute to 30% of the total handset radio energy consumption. We found periodic transfers are generated for various reasons such as keep-alive, polling, and user behavior measurements. We further investigate the potential of various traffic shaping and resource control algorithms. Depending on their traffic patterns, applications exhibit disparate responses to optimization strategies. Jointly using several strategies with moderate aggressiveness can eliminate almost all energy impact of periodic transfers for popular applications such as Facebook and Pandora.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
April 2012
1078 pages
ISBN:9781450312295
DOI:10.1145/2187836
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Univ. de Lyon: Universite de Lyon

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 April 2012

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Author Tags

  1. 3G networks
  2. RRC state machine
  3. periodic transfers
  4. periodicity detection
  5. radio resource optimization
  6. smartphone applications

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  • Research-article

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WWW 2012
Sponsor:
  • Univ. de Lyon
WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
April 16 - 20, 2012
Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Collaborative Edge-Cloud Data Transfer Optimization for Industrial Internet of ThingsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2025.353226136:3(580-597)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2024)Unveiling the 5G Mid-Band Landscape: From Network Deployment to Performance and Application QoEProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672269(358-372)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • (2021)Observing a Moving Target - Reliable Transmission of Debug Logs from Mobile Embedded Devices2021 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)10.1109/IC2E52221.2021.00038(224-230)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2019)SODACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems10.1145/327552113:3(1-24)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2019
  • (2019)Low Power TCP for Enhanced Battery Life in Mobile DevicesICC 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC.2019.8761824(1-7)Online publication date: May-2019
  • (2018)Overbooking network slices through yield-driven end-to-end orchestrationProceedings of the 14th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3281411.3281435(353-365)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Real-Time Computing and the Evolution of Embedded System Designs2018 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS)10.1109/RTSS.2018.00011(1-12)Online publication date: Dec-2018
  • (2018)SURF: Supervisory Control of User-Perceived Performance for Mobile Device Energy Savings2018 IEEE 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS.2018.00057(511-522)Online publication date: Jul-2018
  • (2018)Identifying In-App User Actions from Mobile Web LogsAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-3-319-93037-4_24(300-311)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2018
  • (2017)Measuring and Understanding RRC State Machine Optimization in Light of Recent AdvancementsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.259816416:5(1330-1342)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
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