ReWAP: Reducing Redundant Transfers for Mobile Web Browsing via App-Specific Resource Packaging

Abstract

Redundant transfer of resources is a critical issue for compromising the performance of mobile Web applications (a.k.a., apps) in terms of data traffic, load time, and even energy consumption. Evidence demonstrates that the current cache mechanisms are far from satisfactory. With lessons learned from how native apps manage their resources, in this article, we present the ReWAP approach to fundamentally reducing redundant transfers by restructuring the resource loading of mobile Web apps. ReWAP is based on an efficient resource-packaging mechanism where stable resources are encapsulated and maintained into a package, and such a package shall be loaded always from the local storage and updated by explicitly refreshing. By retrieving and analyzing the update of resources, ReWAP maintains resource packages that can accurately identify which resources can be loaded from the local storage for a considerably long period. ReWAP also provides a wrapper for mobile Web apps to enable loading and updating resource packages in the local storage as well as loading resources from resource packages. ReWAP can be easily and seamlessly deployed into existing mobile Web architectures with minimal modifications, and is transparent to end-users. We evaluate ReWAP based on continuous 15-day access traces of 50 mobile Web apps randomly chosen from Alexa top 500 ranking list. Compared to the original mobile Web apps with cache enabled, ReWAP can significantly reduce the data traffic, with the median saving up to 51 percent. In addition, ReWAP can incur only very minor runtime overhead of the client-side browsers and thus does not compromise user experiences.