Characterizing the behavior of handheld devices and its implications

Abstract

The Bring-Your-Own-Handheld-device (BYOH) phenomenon continues to make inroads as more people bring their own handheld devices to work or school. While convenient to device owners, this trend presents novel management challenges to network administrators as they have no control over these devices and no solid understanding of the behavior of these emerging devices. In order to cope with the impact of these BYOHs on current existing network management infrastructures, we identify two tightly-coupled questions that network administrators need to answer: (a) how do these BYOHs behave? and (b) how can we manage them more effectively based on the understanding of their behaviors? In response, we design and deploy Brofiler, a framework that could enable network administrators to effectively manage BYOHs via behavior-aware profiling. Our behavior-aware profiling captures the behaviors of each individual BYOH and improves the visibility on managing these BYOHs. In detail, the contributions of our work are threefold. First, we present Brofiler, a time-aware device-centric approach for grouping devices into intuitive behavioral groups from multiple perspectives, including data plane, temporal behavior, and the protocol and control plane. Second, we conduct an extensive study of BYOHs using our approach with real data collected over a year, and highlight several novel insights on the behavior of BYOHs. For example, we find that 70% of the BYOHs generate 50% of their monthly data traffic in one day, while remaining mostly idle the rest of the month. In addition, 68% of BYOHs do not conform to DHCP protocol specifications. Third, we present the implications of our study based on the framework in DHCP management, bandwidth management and access control. Overall, our approach could enable network administrators better understand and manage these new emerging devices for their networks in the post-PC era.

If you build it, will they log on? Wi–Fi usage and behavior while attending National Basketball Association games

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“…In practice, a user looking to access the Internet using wireless technology would log on through a Wi-Fi hotspot. With origin in smaller locations such as coffee shops and airport lounges (Lehr and McKnight, 2003), hotspots are now commonplace in public places throughout the downtown core of major cities, university campuses and hospitals (Divgi and Chlebus, 2013;Prentow et al, 2015;Wei et al, 2017). Besides offering users free Internet access, Wi-Fi hotspots have also been utilized to advance marketing communications from businesses to tech-savvy consumers (Kaiser et al, 2017;Kang, 2017).…”

The Dark Side(-Channel) of Mobile Devices: A Survey on Network Traffic Analysis

“…We survey five works belonging to this subcategory. The works in [19], [62] target campus Wi-Fi networks, while the works in [10], [13], [38] leverage client-side measurements collected through logging apps. The aforementioned works provide interesting results and observations about mobile network traffic characteristics.…”

Analysis of Wireless Network Usage at Universiti Utara Malaysia

“…Further, students in the university are now highly depending on their mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to communicate and learn. Consequently, the number of mobile devices in the network increases and creates a great challenge to network administrators to manage them [1]. In order to maintain a high quality of Internet service provision, bandwidth management must be implemented soon in UUM.…”

“…Mobile computing users bring their own devices to the office or public areas and require a wireless network to connect their devices to the Internet. Network administrators are currently facing challenges to manage these devices effectively in their networks [1]. One of the challenges is to provide the right amount of bandwidth in ensuring the suitable allocation of network resources to all authorized users [2].…”