Quality Measurement of Push Services for Smart Devices

The increased use of smart devices has led to rapid growth in the application (app) market. Many apps have taken advantage of push service to provide real-time notifications to smart device users. In this paper, it is described the operation mechanisms and quality measurement results for two represented push services, Apple Push Notification service and Google Cloud Messaging. The connection management scheme, push transmission delay, retransmission delay, and throughput are examined. In addition, it is discussed the loss behavior of back-to-back push messages due to the small buffer and the abnormal behavior of push service due to Network Address Translation.