A Comparative Study of Traffic Properties for Web Pages Optimized for Mobile Hand-Held and Non-Mobile Devices

Julius Flohr, Joachim Charzinski

Abstract

Even though the mobile Web is gaining more and more importance in the Web environment, relatively little is known about the traffic properties of Web pages optimized for mobile handheld devices (\textit{MHDs}). This paper explores some characteristics of Web sites optimized for MHDs and compares them to their non-mobile counterparts. This is done using actively initiated measurements for which the homepages of the 500 most popular Web sites on the Internet have been contacted. The results show that most mobile versions of the pages are smaller than the non-mobile versions. The average mobile version of a homepage is about 30\% smaller and similarly less complex as the non-mobile version.

Keywords

Internet; Web sites; measurement; mobile communication; Web bugs; smartphone traffic; traffic analysis