Breaking for commercials: characterizing mobile advertising

摘要: Mobile phones and tablets can be considered as the first incarnation of post-PC era. Their explosive adoption rate has been driven by a number factors, with most signifcant influence being applications (apps) app markets. Individuals organizations are able to develop publish apps, popular form monetization is mobile advertising. The advertisement (ad) ecosystem target prior research, but these works typically focused on small set apps or from user privacy perspective. In this work we make use unique, anonymized data corresponding one day traffic for major European carrier more than 3 million subscribers. We further take principled approach characterize ad along dimensions, such overall traffic, frequency, well possible implications in terms energy device. Our analysis demonstrates inefficiencies today's delivery. discuss benefits well-known techniques, pre-fetching caching, limit network signalling overhead caused current systems. A prototype implementation Android devices an improvement 50 % consumption offline ad-sponsored while limiting amount related traffic.