Diverse social networking applications and adaptive mobile networks

In the past years, mobile Internet has witnessed a flourish of various social networking applications. To well understand traffic characteristics of social networking applications and potential impact on mobile networks, we set up an experiment mobile network and analyzed the dynamic traffic behavior of the popular social networking applications in East Asia by typical smartphones. It is observed that the traffic patterns of these social networking applications are quite diverse, and they are related to many factors such as the type of smartphone operating system, application running status, user settings and smartphone screen status. Special characteristics of observed traffic pattern can lead to significant negative impact on mobile networks and smartphones. To resolve these negative impacts and problems of existing solutions, an application assisted mechanism is proposed to tune mobile network adaptively based on dynamic traffic pattern of applications.