Characterizing the utility of smartphone background traffic

The incredible rise in popularity of mobile smart devices has placed tremendous pressure on wireless service providers. While much of the pressure arises from increasingly rich multimedia and social offerings, a sizable portion of the traffic originates when the user is not actively interacting with the device. The focus of this paper is to explore the prevalence and utility of smartphone background traffic through a pool of over one hundred campus smartphone users over a seven-week period from the Spring of 2013. Notably, our work shows that background traffic constitutes a non-trivial portion of wireless traffic ranging between one-third to two-fifths of traffic across the wireless interfaces. Our work breaks down background traffic with respect to diurnal behavior, wireless interface, mobile application, and latency until screen activation to further characterize the data.