Network assisted latency reduction for mobile web browsing

Abstract

To load a webpage, a web browser first downloads the base HTML file of the page in order to discover the list of objects referenced in the page. This process takes roughly one round-trip time and constitutes a significant portion of the web browsing delay on mobile devices as wireless networks suffer from longer transmission and access delays compared to wired networks. In this work, we propose a solution for eliminating this initial delay, which is transparent to end systems, does not require modifying HTTP, and is well suited for web browsing on mobile devices. Our solution, called WebPro, relies on a network proxy that builds an up-to-date database of resource lists for the websites visited frequently by network users. The proxy resides in the wired part of the network, and hence can afford to pro-actively build and refresh the resource list database periodically. When a request for a webpage comes to the proxy, it simultaneously fetches the base HTML and all referenced objects required to render the webpage using the corresponding resource list stored in the local database. We also show that the benefits of WebPro become more significant by increasing the complexity of webpages as it is able to circumvent the inter-object dependencies in a webpage. We have built a working prototype of WebPro and have used real-world traffic traces along with live experiments over Wi-Fi and LTE networks to assess its performance. Our results show an average of 26% reduction in page load time for a mix of popular web sites chosen from categories such as news, sports and shopping. Moreover, in comparison to another best known proxy-based solution, WebPro provides delay reductions ranging from 5% to 51% for a variety of web sites.