Understanding the Nature of Social Mobile Instant Messaging in Cellular Networks

Social mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications, running on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets, have become increasingly popular around the world, and have generated significant traffic demands on cellular networks. Despite its huge user base and popularity, little work has been done to characterize the traffic patterns of MIM. Compared with traditional cellular network service, MIM traffic embodies several specific attributes such as non-Poisson arrivals, keep-alive (KA) mechanism and heavy-tailed message length, which consumes even small amount of core network bandwidth but considerable radio resources of mobile access network. This letter investigates user behavior patterns and traffic characteristics of MIM applications, based on real traffic measurements within a large-scale cellular network covering 7 million subscribers. Moreover, we propose a joint ON/OFF model to describe the traffic characteristics of MIM, and evaluate the performance of cellular network running MIM service in various scenarios. Comparing with the MIM service models of 3GPP, our results are more realistic to estimate the networks performance.