Overview

The per-application/delegated data usage monitoring and tracking functionality relies on the xt_qtaguid module in the android-3.0 Linux kernel (kernel/net/netfilter/xt_qtaguid). The socket tagging functionality in the framework (system/core/libcutils/qtaguid.c) relies mainly on the existence of /proc/net/xt_qtaguid/ctrl interface exported by the xt_qtaguid kernel module.

The quota2 netfilter module (originally part of xtables-addons) allows the functionality to set named quota limits and was extended to support notifying userspace when certain limits are reached. Once the quota limit is reached, the quota2 module discards all subsequent network traffic. The framework can also specify additional rules to restrict background data traffic for an application (refer to com.android.server.NetworkManagementSocketTagger.setKernelCounterSet and android.net.NetworkPolicyManager.POLICY_REJECT_METERED_BACKGROUND).

How does it work?

The qtaguid netfilter module tracks the network traffic on a per-socket basis for every application using the unique UID of the owning application.  There are two tag components associated with any socket in the system. The first is the UID which uniquely identifies the application which is responsible for the data transfer (Linux allows the ability to ascribe the ownership of each network socket to the UID of the calling application). The second tag component is used to support additional characterization of the traffic into application developer specified categories. Using these application level tags, an application can profile the traffic into several sub-categories.

In the case of applications that provide network data transfer as a service, such as the download manager, media streaming service, etc, it is possible to attribute the ownership of the network data transfer to the UID of the requesting application using the TrafficStats.setThreadStatsUid() function call. The caller must hold the “android.permission.MODIFY_NETWORK_ACCOUNTING” permission to re-assign the ownership of the network traffic.