Characterization of Wireless Multidevice Users

Abstract

The number of wireless-enabled devices owned by a user has had a huge growth over the last few years. Over one third of adults in the United States currently own three wireless devices -smartphone, laptop and tablet. This paper provides a study of the network usage behavior of today's multi-device users. Using a data collected from a large university campus, we provide a detailed multi-device user (MDU) measurement study of over 30,000 users. The major objective of this work is to study how the presence of multiple wireless devices affect the network usage behavior of users. Specifically, we characterize the usage pattern of the the different device types in terms to total and intermittent usage, how the usage of different devices overlap over time and uncarried device usage statistics. We also study user's preferences of accessing sensitive content and device-specific factors that govern the choice of WiFi encryption type. The study reveals several interesting findings about multi-device users. We see how the usage of tablet and laptops are inter-changeable, how the overall multi-device usage is additive instead of being shared among the devices. We also observe how current DHCP configurations are oblivious to multiple devices which result in inefficient utilization of available IP address space. All the findings about multi-device usage patterns has the potentiality to be utilized by different entities, like app developers, network providers, security researchers, analytics and advertisement systems, to provide more intelligent and informed services to users who have at least two among smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Flutes vs. Cellos: Analyzing Mobility-Traffic Correlations in Large WLAN Traces

“…cellos) nor do they measure spatial metrics. The study in [18] analyzes 32k users on campus, and focuses on multi-device usage. It notes differences between laptops and smartphones in packets, content, and time of usage.…”