Smartphones vs. laptops: comparing web browsing behavior and the implications for caching

In this work we present the differences and similarities of the web browsing behavior in most common mobile platforms. We devise a novel Operating System (OS) fingerprinting methodology to distinguish different types of wireless de-vices (smartphone vs laptops) as well as operating system instances (iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.). We showcase that most of the multimedia content in smartphone devices is delivered via Range-Requests, and a large portion of the video transfers are aborted. We also show that laptop de-vices have more intelligent browser caching capabilities. We investigate the impact of an additional browser cache, and demonstrate that a 10MB browser cache that is able to han-dle partial downloads in smartphones would be enough to handle the majority of the savings. Finally, we showcase that caching policies need to be amended to attain the max-imum possible savings in proxy caches. Based on those op-timizations the emulated proxy cache provides 10 % − 20% in bandwidth savings