Improving Mobile Data Access Using Client Profiles

In this research, we describe a scheme to improve application performance in low-bandwidth mobile networks. The major improvements due to our scheme are motivated by the observation that different applications typically have different preferences for latency and recency. Traditional caching and scheduling schemes do not provide interfaces for clients to express these preferences. In our scheme, client preferences are expressed using voluntary profiles, application-specific targets for latency and recency of data. We describe a complete framework for incorporating profile-based decision making into the cache utilization, downloading, and scheduling decisions at a mobile base station. Compared to previous work in utility-based scheduling, our profiles are extremely simple. We analyze the performance of profiles using simulations, and compare profile-driven access to different non-profile-aware schemes. Our experiments show three main results: (1) Even very simple profiles are enough to discriminate the service received by different applications, and are thus useful in supporting diverse application sets; (2) Compared to profile-unaware algorithms, profile-driven accesses improve the resource utilization on the wireless downlink as well as the fixed network access link, thus giving service providers an incentive to support profiles; and (3) Clients who give uncooperative profiles increase the latencies of their own applications, thus providing all clients an incentive to provide fair and accurate profiles.

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