Breaking for Commercials:Characterizing Mobile AdvertisingNarseo Vallina-Rodriguez†, Jay Shah†, Alessandro Finamore‡
Yan Grunenberger⋄, Hamed Haddadi§, Dina Papagiannaki⋄
Jon Crowcroft†
University of Cambridge† Politecnico di Torino‡Telefonica Research⋄Queen Mary University of London§
IMC 2012, Boston, MA
2
The web is becoming mobile
* Downloads. As of January, 2012
+25 billion
+10 billion
2
3
The role of mobile ads
73% of Android Apps are free [Leontiadis,HotMobile’12]
Mobile advertising is an important source of income for mobile developers
4
Mobile User
Usage stats
Mediation Services
Mobile Ad EcosystemApp developer
(publisher)
£
5
Traffic Flow: AdMob
DNS Server
media.admob.com googleads.g.doubleclick.netpagead2.googlesyndication.com
IDLE
FACH
DCH
EN
ER
GY
DNS LookupGET: http://media.admob.com/sdk-core-v40.jsGET: http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/mads/gma?...GET: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/images/…
2 seconds
6 seconds
6
Research Question
How does mobile advertisement delivery impact on the cellular network and the
battery life of the user?
7
Paper contributions
1st characterization and evaluation of mobile ad trafficNO WEB ADS!
Ad traffic is wasteful in terms of energy and spectrum Only network activity for many apps Strong component of users’ daily traffic Static objects, frequently re-downloaded and distributed
over CDNs Do not tuned with the peculiarities of cellular networks
Design of spectrum and energy-efficient ad delivery mechanism
8
Methodology
9
Identifying Ad Traffic
Traces from app execution (tcpdump)
+ Controlled understanding of cause-effect relationships
- Limited to ad networks used by developers
Ad Networks documentation+ Detailed
- Not always available
Inspecting traffic traces from cellular providers+ Identify strategies from different players
+ Large scale impact
- Noisy
10
Rule set
Set of 122 rules identifying: Type of service (ad network, mediation service and
analytics) Type of action (request ad, configuration script, report click,
…) …Domain Object Path Type of
ServiceAction
media.admob.com adk-core-v40.js Ad Network Configuration script
*.g.doubleclick.net mads/gma Ad Network Get Ad
*.googlesyndication.com pagead/ Ad Network Get static content
*.g.doubleclick.net aclk Ad Network Report click
Full rule set: http://www.retitlc.polito.it/finamore/mobileAdRegexDictionary.xlsx
11
+3 million mobile subscribers
Full day traces on a major European carrier
1.7 billion TCP connections (including HTTP headers) 22TB of volume downloaded
Mobile traffic dataset
12
Energy and spectrum overhead
13
Mobile Apps Nature
Mobile apps are usually offline by nature!!!!!
Top AdMob Android Apps
Rank App Name Category Users (%)
1 Angry Birds Arcade 11.48
2 Advanced Task Killer System Tools 9.77
3 Soccer Scores (FotMob) Sports 3.53
4 Drag Racing Arcade 2.69
5 Bubble Blast Arcade 2.69
14
Purity
time
Pure activity period
TCP F
low
s
Definition:
Flow A and flow B are part of the same activity period if:
start(flowA) < start (flowB) < end (flowA)
Mixed activity period
81.1%, 68.2% and 69.7% of activity periods are pure for Android, iPhone and iPad respectively
15
Ad traffic is not tuned with the properties of cellular networks, specially the RNC state machine
Nearly 50% of Adrequests happen within 10 secs.
Session interleave
time
Pure activity period
TCP F
low
s Mixed activity period
interleave
16
Millennial Media
Inappropriate close of TCP connections adds additional energy and spectrum waste
L4 inefficienciesAdMob
§
17
Doubling refresh rate adds 40% of energy overheadInappropriate use of TCP connections adds 10%-40% energy overhead
Energy overheadC
urr
en
t (m
A)
0
100
200
300
AirplaneMode
18
Energy and spectrum-aware ad networks
19
1. Avoiding redundant transmissions
2. Reducing the number of transitions between the power modes in mobile networks
Actually, …
Ad traffic is mainly composed by static content +40% of volume are images Content distributed over CDNs
How to save energy?
20
Exploits well-known techniques Connectivity awareness Flow coordination Batching, caching and pre-fetching
Supports all the features of existing ad networks
Our approach: AdCache
21
Prototype evaluationExisting ad networks
Prototype Evaluation
Up to 50% energy savings!
Cu
rre
nt
(mA
)
0
100
200
300
AirplaneMode
22
Conclusions
23
Summary
Mobile app ads are responsible for energy, traffic and spectrum waste Free applications are mainly offline Lack of caching: users can waste hundreds of
MB/day Ad traffic is not tuned with the RNC state machine Inappropriate use of TCP
Simple traffic management techniques can be beneficial
… more interesting results in the paper!
… and lots of things to do! 3GPP != Ethernet
25
Additional Slides
50% of Android devices, 5% of volume
Ad Traffic Volume
26
Strong component of users’ daily traffic
Static objects, heavily re-downloaded The top 10 objects account for 1% of the total volume
27
Players sharing the cake
Google services dominate the ad ecosystem but in Analytic Services
28
Traffic re-downloads
Top 10 objects account for 1% of total volume
29
Google services dominate the ad ecosystem also in terms of flows and volume
Volume and flows
30
Multiple organizations serve ad content Usually, ad nets use services from a single
organization Google and Amazon are the preferred services
Ad content distribution
Top Related