Method and apparatus for real-time collection of information about application level activity and other user information on a mobile data network

摘要

Method and apparatus for real-time collection of information about application level activity and other user information on a mobile data network. A collector device communicates with a router in a mobile data network so that the collector can obtain substantially all of the data coming from the router in real-time and correlate the data to specific users. The collector device comprises a user identity subsystem, filter, and data transfer subsystem. The user identity subsystem inspects the data for source IP addresses and correlates them to corresponding mobile phone numbers. The filter then inspects the collected data and retains only application-level data. Lastly, the data transfer subsystem transfers the filtered data to a data reporting and analysis system.

主权项

1. A collector device for real-time, transparent monitoring of application-level data activity on a mobile data network, the collector device being in communication with a corresponding mobile data network router, the collector device comprising:
an input coupled to the network router and configured to receive substantially all data communications from the network router, wherein the data communications include application-level data relating to specific users' use of applications on corresponding user mobile devices; a user identity subsystem, coupled to the input, for correlating phone numbers associated with the user mobile devices with IP addresses and the application-level data, wherein the user identity subsystem modifies the correlation of phone numbers to IP addresses and application-level data in response to the detection of new IP address assignments for the corresponding phone number; a filter subsystem configured to:
receive the substantially all data communications from the network router and retain only application-level data;identify session requests in the application-level data from the specific users' use of the applications on the user mobile devices;parse at least one of a uniform resource locator (URL) and a user agent in each of the session requests to identify specific destinations requested therein;using information parsed from at least one of the URL and the user agent to classify a content type of a webpage associated with the content requested in each of the session requests; and a demographics subsystem to determine demographic information to associate with each of the specific user's phone numbers, the demographics module determines the demographic information using the correlated phone numbers.