Title: An insight into mobile advertising and its impact on the resources of handheld devices: a survey

Authors: Abdurhman Albasir; Maazen Alsabaan; Kshirasagar Naik

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada ' Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of mobile devices, people become more attached to them than ever. This growth combined with millions of applications (apps) make smartphones a favourite means of communication among users. The available contents on smartphones, apps and web come into two versions: 1) free contents that are monetised via advertisements (ads); 2) paid ones that are monetised by users' subscription fees. However, the resources on-board are limited and the existence of ads can adversely impact them. These issues brought the need for good understanding of mobile advertising eco-system and how such limited resources should be efficiently used. This survey paper gives an overview on the mobile advertising eco-system and reviews the work done in the regard of the influence of such ads on smartphones' battery life and monthly data usage. It discusses and slightly addresses the open issues and research directions that need to be further investigated. This work is meant to motivate: 1) the researchers to investigate the energy and bandwidth issues further and hence, come up with more practical solutions; 2) app and web developers to consider the seriousness implications of embedding 'expensive' ads in their apps and web-pages on the end users limited resources.

Keywords: mobile advertising; handheld devices; energy cost; bandwidth cost; energy efficiency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2019.097398

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2019 Vol.6 No.1, pp.50 - 67

Received: 24 Aug 2017
Accepted: 05 Feb 2018
Published online: 21 Jan 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article