Introduction to Smartphone

Ecosystems

Suranga Seneviratne
10 March 2016

www.data61.csiro.au
 Queries from last week

Overview

Smartphone Ecosystems

Stakeholders

Network Interactions

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Queries from last week
• Background reading
Head First Java, (2nd Ed.)
Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice (2nd Ed.)
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (6th Ed.)
• Final Exam
Will be 2 hours closed book.
• Android Devices
Are available for loan per group basis by filling out a form,
week 3 onwards. Marks will not be released until phones are
returned.
• If you want to buy one
A simple one with Android 4.0 or above would do. There
some cheap prepaid phones. E.g.
(https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/
prepaid-mobiles/telstra-smart-plus-t816.html)

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Overview

• Smartphone adoption grew exponentially last few years and it

is expected to show a similar growth in coming years.
I Currently, 2.6B smartphone subscriptions globally1 .
I Predicted to surpass the fixed line subscriptions by 2020.
I Expected to reach 6.1B subscriptions by 2020. (70% of the
world population)2 .
• Why it is important for telecom/network engineers to have an
understanding on Smartphone ecosystems?

1
http://www.ericsson.com/mobility-report
2
CISCO Visual Networking Index
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Overview cont.
• Why?
I Simply, they clog the networks!.
I Represent 29% of the global handsets and generates 69% of
the total traffic.
I Support large number of resource-hungry applications.
(Video, Web, VOIP, Instant Messaging etc.).
I Further complications Mobility and limited battery life.
• To write more efficient and user friendly smartphone apps we
need to have an in-depth understanding on how apps
communicate with different networks.
• When designing, troubleshooting, and performance tuning of
networks we need to know what types apps generate traffic in
the network.

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Smartphone Ecosystem
• Number stakeholders interact as a system to provide or
consume hardware and software related to smartphones, each
having different benefits (financial or non-financial).
• Example stakeholders,
I Platform vendors
I Hardware vendors
I App developers .... and many more.

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A more detailed view
Development
Tools

ISPs / Mobile Hosting / App API / SDK

Network Cloud / Developers providers
Operators Infrastructure

Market
Operators
Users

Platforms

Smartphone /
Hardware
Manufactures

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Platforms/Hardware & App
Markets
• Platform Vendors: Google (Android), Apple (iOS),
Microsoft (Windows), Amazon (Fire OS), ....
• Hardware: Google, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, ....
• App Markets: Google Play, Apple Store, Windows Store, ....

Figure: Smartphone platforms growth3 .

3
http://www.statista.com/statistics
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Smartphone platforms

OS Maintained OS Details Hardware Development

By Vendors Tools

Samsung Android Studio

Android Google Unix-like HTC Eclipse
Motorola Java

Xcode
Swift
iOS Apple Unix-like Apple
(Used to be
Object C)

Microsoft
Visual Studio
Windows Microsoft Windows HTC
C#
(Nokia)

Momentics IDE
Blackberry RIM Unix-like RIM
C/C++

Many other
small players

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Smartphone Apps/Developers

• Free: Users can download and use these apps without any
direct cost. However, most of the time these apps contain
in-app advertisements.
• Paid: In the case of paid apps, users are required to make a
payment before the app can be downloaded. Subscription
based apps involve a recurring payment to get continuous
access to the services offered.
• Freemium: These apps are offered for free as well. However,
a user only has access to a limited set of features or levels of
the app, and the rest is locked.

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Smartphone Apps/Developers

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Third Party SDKs / Service
Providers
• Advertising (Provides In-App advertisements)

• Analytics (Collect data from users for analytics)

• Bug Tracking (Assist developers identify problems/bugs)

• Payments (Provides capabilities to support in-app purchases)

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Telecom Operators/ISPs
• Provides the “pipe” to all the applications
• Capacity crunch (Access network and Backhaul bottlenecks)
• Slightly left out of the food-chain
• Inefficient app designs cause network overloads

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Smartphone Users

• Limited bandwidth/Throughput
I Most of the data plans are capped.
I Many bandwidth-hungry applications.
I What happened to all of my data?
• Limited battery
I Many poorly designed apps drains brattery
I Number of unnecessary background communications.
I Why my battery drains so fast?
• Data security and privacy
I Is this app safe to use?
I Is my data safe?

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App Network Interactions
Experiment Set-Up
• Experiment Set Up

Laptop sharing the wired internet

connection through WiFi

Internet

WireShark packet sniffer

Network Trace File

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App Network Interactions
Configuration
• Download & Install Wireshark4
• Optional: Install & Set up a GeoIP Database5
• Set up your computer to share the wired connection over WiFi
• Capture the network traffic in the relevant interface.
(Capture → Interfaces)

4
https://www.wireshark.org/download.html
5
https://wiki.wireshark.org/HowToUseGeoIP
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App Network Interactions
Trace file

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App Network Interactions
IO Graph & Endpoint List

• Statistics → IO Graph & Endpoint List

Level Start

Level Start
Start

VirusTotal
Flurry

Akamai
Google
Google

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Assignment 1: Question 1

• Take an app of your choice repeat the experiment.

• Identify the owners of the IP addresses.
• Include your trace and the IO graph and Endpoint List.
• Try to provide an explanation for the app to contact the
above identified IP addresses.

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Research project

Topics
• Bandwidth & Network
• Energy
• Security
• Privacy
• Location Based Services
• Mobile Systems
• Emerging Smart Devices

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