Section: New Results

Understanding of modern web traffic

Contributors: Salim Afra, Chadi Barakat, Byungchul Park and Damien Saucez.

Mobile devices are everywhere nowadays but little is known about the way they differ from traditional non-mobile devices in terms of usage and the characteristics of the web traffic they generate. In this contribution, we propose a first study of the differences that exist between mobile and non-mobile Web traffic seen from the lorgnette of a university campus network. The study is performed at different levels starting from users' behavior to transport protocol configurations. Our main findings are that mobile users often browse websites tailored to their devices. They show a significant adoption of Apps to browse the web and a preference for multimedia content. The different way of conceiving the web for mobiles is reflected at the HTTP and TCP levels with much less HTTP redirections and abrupt TCP connection terminations. Interestingly, mobile traffic carries larger contents and have larger TCP flows than non-mobile traffic. By cross-analysis of protocols and users' behavior, we explain why TCP flows in mobile traffic are larger than those of non-mobiles. Further details on this study can be found in [30] .