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Introduction
Over the last decade the cellular phone industry and the World Wide Web
have experienced a phenomenal growth as people around the world have embraced
these technologies at a remarkable rate. Today, most major wireless service providers
in the United States, Europe, and Japan offer wireless Internet services and many
Internet companies provide content that has been adapted to suit the limited
display, bandwidth, memory, and processing power of small devices.
Another emerging trend, related to wireless Internet, has to do with how users
manage the gigantic information flow that the Internet provides.
Realizing that users are being overwhelmed with information,
several web content providers allow users to switch their data access model
from polling and navigation to notifications or alerts. Instead of
periodically browsing through the web sites for potentially useful
information, an increasing number of users are adopting the model where they
register for information in which they are interested. These users provide a callback address usually in the form of an
email address, a cell-phone number, or a pager number, depending on their
perceived importance of the information. Whenever the relevant event is
triggered, the content provider sends a notification to the user. Examples of
some US companies that provide such notifications include Yahoo Mobile, MSN
Mobile, AOL Anywhere, and InfoSpace. All of these services allow users to
subscribe to alerts for stock quotes, sports scores, lottery, horoscope,
calendar events etc. If alert services becomes a popular form of user
interaction with the web, it will be critical for content provider and content
management companies to handle these notifications efficiently. Proper
management of notifications involves understanding which types of
notifications are popular, which types of devices are used by subscribers for
receiving notifications, the frequency of sending these notifications on a per
user basis, etc.
In this paper, we study notification and browse services provided by a large
popular commercial web site that is designed specifically for US users who
access it via their cell-phones and PDAs. Unlike most previous web studies,
which have analyzed browsing services provided over wired networks, we focus
primarily on a web server that delivers notification and browsing services
over wireless channels. We analyze notification and browser traces to
understand the system load, the type of content that is accessed, and user
behavior. We believe that our study is important for content providers,
wireless ISPs, and web site managers.
We note here that we do not study the performance of the web server
subsystem or its architectural design. Instead, we use web server logs
to analyze the browse and notification patterns of wireless web users.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2
we review previous work done in the field of web trace analysis. In
Section 3, we describe the different ways in which the web site
is accessed, the characteristics of the data logs, and the types of analyses
we carry out. We present detailed analysis of the notification and browse logs
in Sections 4 and Section 5, respectively. In
Section 6, we examine the degree of correlation between
the usage of browse and notification services. We conclude in
Section 7.
Next: Related Work
Up: Characterizing Alert and Browse
Previous: Characterizing Alert and Browse
Lili Qiu
2002-04-17