How to Reduce Smartphone Traffic Volume by 30%?

The unprecedented growth in smartphone usage has fueled a massive increase in cellular network traffic volumes. We investigate the feasibility of applying Redundancy Elimination (RE) for today’s smartphone traffic, using packet traces collected from 20 real mobile users for five months. For various RE techniques including caching, file compression, delta encoding, and packet stream compression, we present the first characterization of their individual effectiveness, the interaction among multiple jointly applied RE techniques, and their performance on mobile handsets. By leveraging several off-the-shelf RE techniques operating at different layers, we can achieve an overall reduction of smartphone traffic by more than 30%.