Vivisecting WhatsApp through large-scale measurements in mobile networks

Abstract

WhatsApp, the new giant in instant multimedia messaging in mobile networks is rapidly increasing its popularity, taking over the traditional SMS/MMS messaging. In this paper we present the first large-scale characterization of WhatsApp, useful among others to ISPs willing to understand the impacts of this and similar applications on their networks. Through the combined analysis of passive measurements at the core of a national mobile network, worldwide geo-distributed active measurements, and traffic analysis at end devices, we show that: (i) the WhatsApp hosting architecture is highly centralized and exclusively located in the US; (ii) video sharing covers almost 40% of the total WhatsApp traffic volume; (iii) flow characteristics depend on the OS of the end device; (iv) despite the big latencies to US servers, download throughputs are as high as 1.5 Mbps; (v) users react immediately and negatively to service outages through social networks feedbacks.