QoMOSN - On the analysis of traffic and Quality of Experience in Mobile Online Social Networks

The popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has created an immense amount of research for the analysis of these networks and the traffic produced by popular applications such as Facebook. In this paper we study the networking characteristics of OSNs in mobile networks, analyzing 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. To enable a better understanding of the Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements of these two applications in the mobile context, we present the results of a subjective QoE study of both Facebook and WhatsApp in smartphones. Our study serves the main purpose of better understanding how major OSNs are provisioned in today's mobile networks, paying special attention to their QoE characteristics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper providing such an analysis using large-scale measurements in cellular networks and subjective QoE tests in smartphones.