Abstract:
The rapid adoption of smartphones has engendered a large
ecosystem of mobile data applications. In fact, a large part
of mobile tra c is now data and not voice. Many of these
applications, for example VoIP clients, stay active in the
background. In the background, they may not communi-
cate large amounts of data. However, their regular bursts
of activity can lead to large signaling overheads, wastage of
radio resources, and draining of a phone's battery. Signal-
ing overheads can lead to service outage over a large geo-
graphical region by overloading the radio network controller
(gateway) of the 3G (LTE) network, which is expected to
handle signaling from a large number of base stations.
In this work we propose for Android smartphones an on-the-
phone mechanism to detect background applications that
due to bad design (given the network's settings) or their
malicious nature (exploiting the network's settings) lead to
above mentioned ine ciencies. Speci cally, we propose the
metrics of average energy/byte and the average time-to-state-
promotion (TSP) after the Radio Resource Control (RRC)
enters the IDLE state. The metrics capture an application's
e ciency, which is a function of the network's settings of
RRC inactivity timeout values and an application's back-
ground activity. The e cacy of these metrics is tested on
commonly used Android applications. We also outline a
fully functional ready-to-install tool that we developed and
used for our studies.
