You are here

Breaking for commercials: characterizing mobile advertising

TitleBreaking for commercials: characterizing mobile advertising
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsVallina-Rodriguez, N., J. Shah, A. Finamore, Y. Grunenberger, K. Papagiannaki, H. Haddadi, and J. Crowcroft
Conference NameProceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference
PublisherACM
Conference LocationBoston, MA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-1705-4
Keywordsadvertisement, caching, cellular, energy, smartphones, traffic
Abstract

Mobile phones and tablets can be considered as the first incarnation of the post-PC era. Their explosive adoption rate has been driven by a number of factors, with the most signifcant influence being applications (apps) and app markets. Individuals and organizations are able to develop and publish apps, and the most popular form of monetization is mobile advertising.

The mobile advertisement (ad) ecosystem has been the target of prior research, but these works typically focused on a small set of apps or are from a user privacy perspective. In this work we make use of a unique, anonymized data set corresponding to one day of traffic for a major European mobile carrier with more than 3 million subscribers. We further take a principled approach to characterize mobile ad traffic along a number of dimensions, such as overall traffic, frequency, as well as possible implications in terms of en- ergy on a mobile device.

Our analysis demonstrates a number of inefficiencies in today’s ad delivery. We discuss the benefits of well-known techniques, such as pre-fetching and caching, to limit the energy and network signalling overhead caused by current systems. A prototype im- plementation on Android devices demonstrates an improvement of 50% in terms of energy consumption for offline ad-sponsored apps while limiting the amount of ad related traffic. 

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2398776.2398812
DOI10.1145/2398776.2398812
Citation KeyVal2012
Project year: 
First year
WP(s) associated with the paper: 
WP7 - Dissemination, Exploitation and Standardization
Partner(s) associated with the paper's author(s): 
Politecnico di Torino
Telefonica Investigacion Y Desarrollo Sa
Is this an OFFICIALLY supported mPlane paper?: 
Yes