Characterization of wireless multi-device users

The number of wireless-enabled devices owned by a user has had huge growth over the past few years. Over one third of adults in the United States currently own three wireless devices: a smartphone, laptop, and tablet. This article provides a study of the network usage behavior of today’s multidevice users. Using data collected from a large university campus, we provide a detailed multidevice user (MDU) measurement study of more than 30,000 users. The major objective of this work is to study how the presence of multiple wireless devices affects the network usage behavior of users. Specifically, we characterize the usage pattern of the different device types in terms of total and intermittent usage, how the usage of different devices overlap over time, and uncarried device usage statistics. We also study user preferences of accessing sensitive content and device-specific factors that govern the choice of WiFi encryption type. The study reveals several interesting findings about MDUs. We see how the use of tablets and laptops are interchangeable and how the overall multidevice usage is additive instead of being shared among the devices. We also observe how current DHCP configurations are oblivious to multiple devices, which results in inefficient utilization of available IP address space. All findings about multidevice usage patterns have the potential to be utilized by different entities, such as app developers, network providers, security researchers, and analytics and advertisement systems, to provide more intelligent and informed services to users who have at least two devices among a smartphone, tablet, and laptop.