Understanding mobile Internet usage behavior

Exploring the semantic contents of mobile traffic has significant meaning for Telco operators to gain a better understanding of the traffic generated by their subscribers. The mobile traffic dynamics do not only provide guidance for operators in terms of network planning and resource management, they also help operators to innovate new business models by providing value-added services. The mobile traffic dynamics are not static features. They are developing with the evolution of radio access technologies, subscribers´ adoption of mobile services, etc. In this paper, we analyze the mobile traffic from multiple dimensions based on a large-scale dataset collected by a major European mobile operator in 2012. Within this work, we investigate the traffic dynamics and the application features used by different mobile devices. Moreover, for the first time, we also present a methodology about how to link these metrics to the operating system of mobile devices. We observed a noticeable impact of the operating system on some of the evaluated features.