Network Traffic and User Behavior Analysis of Internet-Based Mobile Messaging Applications: A Case of WeChat

In this paper, we extract the characteristics of WeChat traffic and propose approaches to identify WeChat traffic in cellular data network. WeChat communication mechanisms are discussed. The traffic and usage pattern of Video Call service provided by WeChat are studied from massive traffic data using Spark, differently from previous methods. We analyze the features of WeChat Video Call service, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) application in three aspects, which are (i) daily/weekly usage pattern, (ii) traffic/usage distribution, (iii) conversation time distribution. Our analysis has two important features. Firstly, the massive mobile subscriber data we used in our experiments was collected from a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) covering an entire province in Northern China ensuring that the results reflect the real characteristics of service in question in cellular network. Secondly, we investigate that the WeChat Video Call usage times fit with the power law distribution. Our results are important for cellular network operators and service providers to realize WeChat traffic identification methods and user behavior of Video Call, which imply information for optimization of their services.