A behavior-aware profiling of handheld devices

The Bring-Your-Own-Handheld-device (BYOH) phenomenon continues to make inroads as more people bring their own handheld devices to work or school. While convenient to device owners, this trend presents novel management challenges to network administrators. Prior efforts only focused on studying either the comparative characterization of aggregate network traffic between BYOHs and non-BYOHs or network performance issues, such as TCP and download times or mobility issues. We identify one critical question that network administrators need to answer: how do these BYOHs behave individually? In response, we design and deploy Brofiler, a behavior-aware profiling framework that improves visibility into the management of BYOHs. The contributions of our work are two-fold. First, we present Brofiler, a time-aware device-centric approach for grouping devices into intuitive behavioral groups. Second, we conduct an extensive study of BYOHs using our approach with real data collected over a year, and highlight several novel insights on the behavior of BYOHs. These observations underscore the importance of that BYOHs need to be managed explicitly as they behave in unique and unexpected ways.