Smartphone traffic patterns

Abstract: The growing popularity of new generation mobile terminals, known as „smartphones‟,has increased the variety and number of such devices. These devices make use of the resources offered by Universal Mobile Telecommunication Services (UMTS) networks toaccess on-line services such as web browsing, e-mail, audio and video streaming, etc. UMTS networks have to deal with an increasing amount of data traffic generated by smartphones. Because of the fact that the smartphone is battery powered and is trying to satisfy the needs ofboth applications and human users there is a need to be smarter about how to manage both network and terminal resources. This thesis explores the possibility of making a better use of the network and terminal resources by exploiting correlations in the events of the smartphone-generated traffic. We propose a mechanism, through which the network can predict if a terminal is going to produce data transmission or reception in a near future, based on past events in its traffic. According to this prediction, the network will be able to decide if it keeps or releases the resources allocated to the terminal. We analyze the benefits from the network and the terminal point ofview. We also describe a method to estimate an upper bound of the time until the next transmission or reception of data in a near future. We show that it is possible a reduction of the time that each terminal wastes in its maximum power consumption state, but this reduction implies a penalty in the transmission/reception throughput of the terminal. The reduction is not uniform for all terminals: terminals whose traffic presents a predictable behavior gain the most. Estimates of upper bounds of time until the next transmission or reception are more accurate if they are made taking as input information about interarrival times of previous packets.