Causes of TCP Reset in Mobile Web Browsing

Abstract: Web browsing has been one of the most popular activities on the internet. The increasing importance of the Web in everyday life calls for device-independent access to existing web sites. Although, there is full Web access available on mobile phones the user experience is often poor when compared to the Web user experience on Personal Computer (PC). Therfore, it is important for the Internet service provider to find the indications of user dissatisfaction from the network. While using the mobile Web, user can normally abort the transfer by pressing the stop or reset buttons in the browsers, leaving the page being downloaded by following a bookmark or can close the connection. Such events can be observed through the TCP reset (RST) flag from traffic on network level. In this thesis we have investigated the possible causes of TCP RST flags mobile Web session is interrupted. We further analyze up to what extent we can rely on TCP RST flags for being an indication of user dissatisfaction in mobile web browsing. Therefore, an experiment testbed is developed to capture the TCP packet traces during controlled active tests. Results are gathered using mobile devices with four popular mobile operating systems (OS). The trace files captured are analyzed using perl script to dicern the flow and focusing on the TCP RST flag during the flow. Further, TSTAT tool is used to validate our trace files.