In recent years, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) have met anincreasing commercial success and have become a fundamental element of theeveryday life for billions of people all around the world. Mobile devices areused not only for traditional communication activities (e.g., voice calls andmessages) but also for more advanced tasks made possible by an enormous amountof multi-purpose applications (e.g., finance, gaming, and shopping). As aresult, those devices generate a significant network traffic (a consistent partof overall Internet traffic). For this reason, the research community has beeninvestigating security and privacy issues that are related to the networktraffic generated by mobile devices, which could be analyzed to obtaininformation useful for a variety of goals (ranging from device security andnetwork optimization, to fine grained user profiling). In this paper, we review the works that contributed to the state of the artof network traffic analysis targeting mobile devices. In particular, we presenta systematic classification of the works in the literature according to threecriteria: (i) the goal of the analysis; (ii) the point where the networktraffic is captured; and (iii) the targeted mobile platforms. In this survey,we consider points of capturing such as Wi-Fi Access Points, softwaresimulation, inside physical devices or emulators. We also review and comparethe different models and techniques used in the surveyed works to carry outtheir analyses, which could be ported to other emerging domains (e.g., Internetof Things and Software Defined Networking). We believe our survey will be areference work for researchers and practitioners in this research field.
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