A first look at SIM-enabled wearables in the wild

Abstract

Recent advances are driving wearables towards stand-alone devices with cellular network support (e.g. SIM-enabled Apple Watch series-3). Nonetheless, a little has been studied on SIM-enabled wearable traffic in ISP networks to gain customer insights and to understand traffic characteristics. In this paper, we characterize the network traffic of several thousand SIM-enabled wearable users in a large European mobile ISP. We present insights on user behavior, application characteristics such as popularity and usage, and wearable traffic patterns. We observed a 9% increase in SIM-enabled wearable users over a five month observation period. However, only 34% of such users actually generate any network transaction. Our analysis also indicates that SIM-enabled wearable users are significantly more active in terms of mobility, data consumption and frequency of app usage compared to the remaining customers of the ISP who are mostly equipped with a smartphone. Finally, wearable apps directly communicate with third parties such as advertisement and analytics networks similarly to smartphone apps.