Google cloud messaging (GCM): An evaluation

This paper presents a survey on the timing performance of Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). We evaluate GCM in real world experiments, and at a reasonable scale involving thousands of real users. Our findings reveal that the GCM message delivery is unpredictable, namely having a reliable connection to Google's GCM servers on the client device does not guarantee a timely message arrival. Therefore, GCM is not suitable for time sensitive and/or "must-deliver-to-all" app scenarios. On the other hand, GCM delivers the push messages to a big portion of the subscribers (more than 40% in any experiment scenario) in a reasonable timeframe (in 10 seconds). Therefore, GCM may be a good fit for the application scenarios where random multicasting is sufficient, such as crowdsourcing systems. Our results provide a through evaluation of the GCM performance, and will guide developers and researchers to decide whether GCM is suitable for their intended use cases.