Online Social Networks anatomy: On the analysis of Facebook and WhatsApp in cellular networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have rapidly become an integral part of our daily lives, and hundreds of millions of people are nowadays remotely connected trough popular OSNs such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and WhatsApp. While much has been said and studied about the social aspects of OSNs, little is known about the network side of OSNs, specially regarding their network and traffic footprints, as well as their content delivery infrastructures. In this paper we study these networking aspects of OSNs, vivisecting the most popular OSNs in western countries: Facebook and WhatsApp. By analyzing two large-scale traffic traces collected at the cellular network of a major European ISP, we characterize and compare the networking behavior of Facebook and WhatsApp, considering not only the traffic flows but also the network infrastructures hosting them. Our study serves the main purpose of better understanding how major OSNs are provisioned in today's Internet. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper providing such an analysis using large-scale measurements in cellular networks.