Optimizing the update packet stream for web applications
Venue
ICST International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems (BROADNETS) (2010)
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Muthuprasanna Muthusrinivasan, Manimaran Govindarasu
BibTeX
Abstract
The Internet has evolved to an extent where users now expect any-where any-time and
any-form access to their personalized data and applications of choice. However
providing a coherent (seamless) user experience across multiple devices has been
relatively hard to achieve. While the 'how to sync' problem has been well studied
in literature, the complementary 'when to sync' problem has remained relatively
unexplored. While frequent updates providing higher user satisfaction/retention are
naturally more desirable than sparse updates, the steadily escalating resource
costs are a significant bottleneck. We thus propose extensions to the traditional
periodic refresh model based on an adaptive 'smart sync approach' that enables
variable rate updates closely modeling expected user behavior over time. An
experimental evaluation of the proposed mechanism on a sizeable subset of users of
the GMAIL web interface indicates that the proposed refresh policy can achieve the
best of both worlds - limited resource provisioning and minimal user-perceived
delays.
