Characterizing Instant Messaging Apps on Smartphones

Proliferation of smart devices has fueled the popularity of using mobile instant messaging (IM) apps at a rapid pace. While the IM apps on smartphones have become increasingly popular, there has only been a little research on understanding the characteristics of these apps. Because most of the IM apps use proprietary protocols, it is challenging to analyze their internal operations. In this work, we present a comprehensive characterization of mobile IM apps using experiments on LTE cellular network. We decompose the operations of an IM app into multiple independent states which allows us to systematically study them. We characterize the energy and bandwidth efficiency of each of the states and provide numerous insights. Our analysis reveals that typing notification feature of the IM apps is a major contributor to the energy consumption. We also find that the bandwidth efficiency of current IM apps are alarmingly poor compared to other applications such as email and web surfing. These, along with other findings, provided in this work can help improve the energy and network performance of IM apps.