What do consumers know about the effects of signaling? We pay attention to our data plan costs — such as how many bytes of data we use for Skype calls, sending photos or watching YouTube videos. But signaling remains mysterious, because we don’t pay for it in any obvious way. And because it operates transparently, we are not aware of its impact.
The Alcatel-Lucent Mobile App Rankings report wants to change that, by including signaling information in the “application cost” section of this report, right along with “data volume costs.” This data can help consumers and mobile app developers gain a better understanding of these nearly invisible events that impact batteries all day long – even when not actively using the mobile phone.
Signaling depletes batteries
The bottom line is this: Mobile applications that signal more often will deplete your device batteries faster. Of course, there are other factors affecting battery life. Among the worst drains are very bright phone screens, Wi-Fi constantly searching for a signal and apps checking regularly for new software versions. But the signaling that an application generates is another significant drain, sapping your battery’s power. Our Mobile Apps Rankings study found that an average user’s mobile device signaled 250 times every day – every 6 minutes on average!
But it’s important to recognize that applications vary widely in the amount of signaling they generate. Figure 1 makes this very clear. Apps appearing near the top of the graph generate the most signaling. And it makes sense that they’re primarily social media apps, since these app users often send short text messages and receive lots of notifications telling them that someone wants to connect or someone has retweeted a message.
Figure 2 examines daily signaling events more closely to discover how many events (on average) can be attributed to a given app installed on a mobile device. Yahoo! Messenger, for example, generates 76% of an average user’s daily signaling events. (That’s 190 out of 250 events every day.)
To help reduce battery drain, these kinds of high-signaling applications would obviously benefit from signaling optimization. But to understand what steps can be taken, we first need to take some of the mystery out of signaling.
What is signaling?
Signals are the messages sent between your device and the network to set up whatever is needed for data to start flowing. The signaling activity falls within four main categories of events:
Ways to reduce signaling
How can battery drain be reduced? Strategies usually revolve around the combination of two approaches: They focus on reducing the number of notifications that wake up the phone. Or they reduce the number of times a phone must grab or release a channel during active use.
Strategy 1: Reducing notifications. Notifications can’t be turned off completely, because they are a necessary part of messaging. But app developers can promote reductions by offering configuration options for different types of notifications. Then consumers can play an important role by looking for apps that provide this flexibility — and carefully choosing just how much notification they want to receive. Here are some examples of these options and how they work:
Social media apps. These apps could improve their flexibility by offering different options for how frequently notifications are sent. For example, retweet notifications could be sent immediately, while new followers could be grouped into one notification per day or week.
Strategy 2: Reducing channel allocation “grab & release” cycle. This type of optimization is in the hands of app developers. But here are a few key points that everyone should know about:
The Alcatel-Lucent Mobile App Rankings report helps shed some light on the impacts of signaling, which are not widely understood, so far. By learning more about signaling, notification and channel allocation, consumers can gain more control over their battery consumption. And developers can design better options for reducing the load on networks and batteries. The collaboration between these three stakeholders ultimately enhances consumers’ experience with their mobile devices.
Alcatel-Lucent Analytics Beat studies examine a representative cross-section of mobile data customers using the Alcatel-Lucent Wireless Network Guardian, and they are made possible by the voluntary participation of our customers. Collectively, these customers provide mobile service to millions of subscribers worldwide.
Middle Eastern revolutions and national ad campaigns are not the only situations that benefit from social media. Natural disaster communications also can be greatly helped by effectively harnessing the opportunities of social media.
“Communication reliability depends upon how we engage through the media, and new media is the conduit through which we negotiate those relationships,” noted Marya L. Doerfel Ph.D., an associate professor at Rutgers University who focuses on natural disaster communications in a recent Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk article, Social Media, Relationships Boost Emergency Communications.
“In the aftermath of Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, which struck the U.S. East Coast in 2012, organizations at all levels relied on those kinds of relationships,” she said. “It became apparent that those which included citizen-based communication platforms in their repertoire – texting in the case of Katrina – were able to gather more intelligence about what was going on.”
Let’s face it, as a series of LifeTalk articles poses, “What’s the one thing you can’t do without in a natural disaster?”
Source: Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk e-Zine
Effective natural disaster communications not only is about sending out information to citizens, but also about connecting with those in the community who have been impacted and gathering actionable information from this network to help guide relief efforts.
There are two sides to this from an emergency communications perspective: Technologically, there needs to be a way to connect with social media and ingest it for analysis and response. But just as important is the ability to filter key data among the noise. More data by itself can just confuse a situation.
“Emergency response and all public safety agencies need to consider whether they have communications professionals on board so that someone can just manage and interpret that in real-time – thinking about where it is coming from, and what are the hot spots,” noted Doerfel. “How do we deal with the scale of data in real time? In any instance we need to boil it down to common themes as the information pours in. Those main themes will get repeated and iterated though this social media.”
Social media skills need to be more than just something that young emergency personnel possess; increasingly it is becoming fundamental to effective natural disaster communications.
When Katrina hit, things like taking advantage of text messaging made a huge difference.
“The solution to the challenge is not the social media itself, but the adaptability you bring to it,” noted Doerfel. “Resilience is in large part the ability to be adaptable and flexible in the heat of the moment.”
Even if disaster relief operations are not yet savvy when it comes to social media, the need for adaptability and flexibility is well understood.
WebRTC is giving apps a voice and operators new revenue opportunities.
I communicate all day long, but it’s always bifurcated between voice and the web. Last December's Consumer Electronics Show, however, showed me these two worlds will soon be merging thanks to a new technology called Web Real Time Communications (WebRTC).
Technically, WebRTC equips a browser with a standardized structure for communications clients, consisting of native functions for audio, video, and data exchange -- and that’s cool for the side of me that enjoys technology. Appealing to my business side, WebRTC is a catalyst for innovation because it reduces the heavy work of interworking clients between devices and browsers, and because it avoids the tedious download and installation of thick, heavy clients. That combination of technical and business niceties explains why fast movers in the industry are excited by WebRTC.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) coordinate the WebRTC standards, which have strong engagement across established companies and startups, including browser manufacturers, app developers, service providers, and network vendors. Already Google Chrome includes it as of Release 23, and Firefox begins to include it as of Release 20. WebRTC is happening, and it’s happening fast.
At CES, WebRTC was highlighted in a smartphone trends panel (on which I was a panelist) and in Alcatel-Lucent’s booth where I met with service providers and application developers. In our booth, demonstrations melded several third-party applications with our network technology, creating new service concepts by which service providers can earn new revenues.
When talking with service providers, their key question to me was how to stimulate the app developers. So I explained that during tradeshows two years ago, it was a big challenge for folks who weren’t intimately familiar with IMS and SIP. Yet, this year, I could easily point to five of our 12 demos where app developers used New Conversation APIs and WebRTC to simplify how their apps used voice, video, presence, and messaging.
The result was that these specialized app developers (who understand and have neat ideas about healthcare providers, proximity radio apps, digital signage, and fleet management) were freed to create a great app while easily incorporating advanced communications from an IMS service provider.
When the Smartphone Trends panel’s discussion turned to WebRTC, it was all about breaking down barriers. I think WebRTC will remake smartphones, blurring the boundary of how we communicate on phones and consumer electronic devices. Already I see that a key smartphone feature is the network to which it is connected, with LTE boosting usage and speeding the mobile broadband ecosystem’s innovation cycle.
The next step that distinguishes smartphones’ capabilities is the core network’s service control that bridges telecom and web. Networks that have it will enable users to readily communicate across any of their devices, apps, or websites, using the fuller human dynamic of seamless voice, video, and messaging.
When I look to the future, I see that that the service providers who can bridge telecom and the web are those that use an IMS that is equipped with developer-friendly network server APIs and WebRTC. Those complementary technologies turn a regular IMS into a platform for rapid innovation. With WebRTC, that innovation is extended from things that look like phones to any consumer electronic device that has a browser. The result is a remake of the service providers’ competitive field, enabling them to re-engage consumers, enterprises, and app developers. That’s the excitement, and it’s driving a lot of fast movers.
Bridging telecom and the web is a challenge, but the rewards are huge because it moves communications from being a traditional service to communications as a feature inside of apps, websites, and browsers, changing the way we think about communications altogether.
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Our last few blog posts on mobile intelligence focused on how changes to devices and their operating systems can affect both the user experience and the network in positive and negative ways as detected using the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian. Today we will explore the impact of changes introduced by a new version of a popular application.
Last year, Facebook released new versions of their mobile app for Android and iOS. Prior to the new release, Facebook signaling and airtime already accounted for 10% and 15% of the overall load on 2G/3G networks, respectively. As users around the world updated and started to use this new version, we quickly noticed a dramatic increase of almost 60% in the signaling load and 25% in the airtime consumed by the Facebook application. During the same period, the number of Facebook users increased by only 4%. Clearly, it is not the swelling of Facebook’s community that intensified the load, but rather the introduction of new Facebook features for mobile users and underlying platform changes.
The effect on service provider networks was significant, driving up overall (total) signaling traffic and airtime consumption by 5-10%. An application design change by Facebook can be innocuous for fixed line and WiFi users, but can significantly boost the cost of delivery for mobile service operators. This 5-10% increase in signaling and/or airtime translates directly into a 5-10% increase in radio capacity requirement (i.e. CAPEX investment) to continue delivering the same service.
So this is obviously of concern to a mobile operator, but why should Facebook care? The simple answer – you! Higher signaling and airtime usage can directly affect battery life. While today, the increase is likely too small to impose noticeable threat to battery life, we did see a huge jump in signaling with this release. If signaling continues to increase at this rate in future releases, a large portion of users may start to notice that they need to charge up more frequently.
Another trend we detected was an increase in popularity of Facebook video traffic — a whopping 350% increase in volume since the November 15th launch — the most growth of all Facebook traffic. Unlike signaling where the updated software was responsible for the increase, this change is driven by more users enjoying new features such as sharing their news feeds. It is interesting that Facebook-chat traffic decreased during that same period (17% fewer users), indicating that users formerly using chat to communicate might be starting to use Messenger and embedded videos (+6% and +154% more users, respectively). While insignificant from a signaling perspective, the growing appetite for high bandwidth applications like video means service providers must account for bandwidth growth as the use of video continues to rise.
The bottom line – as we continue to feed our mobile applications habit, app developers will need to better consider the implications of their design decisions on the wireless network resources. Optimizing signaling has big benefits for both the service providers and consumers – including better user experience at a more reasonable price and a big one for all of us — longer battery life.