Detection and reporting of keepalive messages for optimization of keepalive traffic in a mobile network

Abstract

Detection of network transactions or keepalives for maintaining long lived connections are disclosed. A keepalive detector can detect keepalive traffic based on keepalive parameters determined from an analysis of socket level network communication log data that record data transfer events including data sent from mobile applications or clients on a mobile device and data received by the mobile applications or clients on the mobile device, timing characteristics, protocol types, etc. Various statistical analyses can be performed on the network communication data to detect keepalives, taking into account variability in intervals of the data transfer events and sizes of data sent and received on each event. The keepalive detector can also detect keepalives from stream data on a mobile device by analyzing socket level communication messages including timing characteristics and amount of data transferred to detect keepalives and report keepalives using a data structure.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method of identifying keepalives from a Transport Control Protocol (TCP) stream, comprising:
 examining patterns of data sent from and received by a mobile application on a mobile device, wherein the patterns have variable intervals and sizes;   performing statistical analyses on the patterns of data sent from and received by the mobile application to detect a pattern that is regular and to detect regular byte sizes; and   identifying the keepalives from the TCP stream occurring over the same TCP session based on information relating to the pattern that is detected as regular and the regular byte sizes.   
     
     
         2 . A method comprising:
 detecting inactivity of a user at a mobile device;   entering a power save mode on the mobile device based on the detected inactivity;   altering behavior of background activities from applications executing on the mobile device while in the power save mode.