TY  - JOUR
A1  - Seufert, Anika
A1  - Poignée, Fabian
A1  - Seufert, Michael
A1  - Hoßfeld, Tobias
T1  - Share and multiply: modeling communication and generated traffic in private WhatsApp groups
T2  - IEEE Access
N2  - Group-based communication is a highly popular communication paradigm, which is especially prominent in mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications, such as WhatsApp. Chat groups in MIM applications facilitate the sharing of various types of messages (e.g., text, voice, image, video) among a large number of participants. As each message has to be transmitted to every other member of the group, which multiplies the traffic, this has a massive impact on the underlying communication networks. However, most chat groups are private and network operators cannot obtain deep insights into MIM communication via network measurements due to end-to-end encryption. Thus, the generation of traffic is not well understood, given that it depends on sizes of communication groups, speed of communication, and exchanged message types. In this work, we provide a huge data set of 5,956 private WhatsApp chat histories, which contains over 76 million messages from more than 117,000 users. We describe and model the properties of chat groups and users, and the communication within these chat groups, which gives unprecedented insights into private MIM communication. In addition, we conduct exemplary measurements for the most popular message types, which empower the provided models to estimate the traffic over time in a chat group.
KW  - communication models
KW  - group-based communication
KW  - mobile instant messaging
KW  - mobile messaging application
KW  - private chat groups
KW  - WhatsApp
Y1  - 2023
UR  - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/34943
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-349430
VL  - 11
ER  -