Communication Traffic Monitoring for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Mobile applications are connecting to the Internet for high quality of experience even though they are not being used actively. These applications may have different network usage patterns on the background. These patterns can be beyond the expectations of the user based on the use of bandwidth. Even worse, there could be a malicious use of network bandwidth like a DoS attack. In this work, we are introducing a tool that can be used to log the network traffic of each user-installed mobile application in either direction for the Android devices. These logs can be analyzed by the user to detect the network usage pattern of each application individually. With the help of the tool we have collected the background network use of some well-known shopping applications for ten days. Then, we have analyzed these network traffic logs and presented the interesting network usage patterns of those applications when they are working at the background.