Mobile web page characteristics: Delivery and stability considerations

The consideration of mobile web page and service access for optimization schemes requires a detailed interpretation that goes beyond the commonplace evaluations of HTTP-delivered objects. Evaluating mobile browser interactions with popular web sites, we note that a non-negligible amount of data is delivered with HTTPS and web site interactions could almost exclusively rely on HTTPS delivery of their content. This increasingly popular approach is currently not widely regarded for performance evaluation and modeling purposes and can result in significant deviations between a model and the real mobile web. We find significant amounts of data are delivered in web site interaction by employing HTTPS and there is an additionally non-significant amount of this data that can be cached. Additionally, we find that the same interactions on the same web site could exhibit fairly large variations over time, which results in considerable measurement bias if individual points in time were used. In turn, our findings indicate that the adequate capturing of the mobile web's characteristics as input for modeling and simulation-driven approaches needs to be reconsidered.