A unified Push Notifications service for mobile devices

Abstract

Push Notifications are widely used in a variety of platforms like GSM, CDMA for various applications servers to communicate with their clients to give real time updates without any pull strategy. They are also used by different service providers to advertise their services to users. However the notifications from different providers are not integrated at the platform level. In this paper we present a unified push service from multiple platforms on a mobile device. Our service provides a generalized interface to accommodate any kind of new push platform. As the service is a unified background service, additional features can be developed to benefit the users and content providers, as well as provide relevant data to applications. Applications have the option to either process the new push messages directly or to send the messages to the notification center without processing, thus enabling power and performance optimization for mobile devices. The service can be used by all the apps and individual mobile applications need not poll separately for information, thus saving power and memory at the device. The service also supports multiple push platforms at the same time. We provide a few unique use cases where this kind of unified service for push notifications can be useful. Finally, we present the results of a few experiments to study the performance metrics of our push architecture, including the latency of receiving push notifications from different sources on the device, as well as the memory consumed by applications using the unified push platform.