Cloud-Based, User-Centric Mobile Application Optimization

The abundance of compute and storage resources available in the cloud makes it well-suited to addressing the limitations of mobile devices. We explore the use of cloud infrastructure to optimize content-centric mobile applications, which can have high communication and storage requirements, based on the analysis of user activity. We present two specific optimizations, precaching and prefetching, as well as the design and implementation of a middleware framework that allows mobile application developers to easily utilize these techniques. Our framework is fully generalizable to any content-centric mobile application, a large and growing class of Internet applications. A news aggregation application is used as a case study to evaluate our implementation. We make use of a cosine similarity scheme to identify users with similar interests, which in turn is used to determine what content to prefetch. Various cache algorithms, implemented for our framework, are also considered. A workload trace and simulation are used to measure the performance of the application and framework. We observe a dramatic improvement in application performance due to use of our framework with a reasonable amount of overhead. Our system also significantly outperforms a baseline implementation that performs the same optimizations without taking user activity into account.