Characterizing traffic generated with laptop computers and mobile handsets in GPRS/UMTS core networks

This paper presents a recent profile of IP data traffic in GPRS/UMTS core networks. The analysis in this paper is based on Layer 3 and 4 headers of packets which we measured in two commercial GPRS/UMTS networks at the end of 2008. We characterize traffic generated with Windows and Symbian devices which are regarded as major operating systems for laptops and mobile handsets in our datasets, respectively. Firstly, we describe the traffic characteristics by device types from the viewpoints of individual flows. After that, we introduce a notion of flow group which has a better capability to represent device-level usage than individual flows. In addition to presenting the differences of traffic characteristics between both device types, we also argue that the notion of flow group is beneficial for identifying operating systems of mobile devices and for alleviating uncertainties in the results of application identification according only to Layer 4 information.