Just-In-Time Push Prefetching: Accelerating the Mobile Web

Web pages take noticeably longer to load when accessing the Internet using high latency wide-area wireless networks like 3G. This delay can result in lower user satisfaction and lost revenue for web site operators. By locating a just-in-time prefetching push proxy in the cloud and routing mobile client web requests through it, web page load times can be perceivably reduced. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the use of a push proxy results in a much smaller dependency on the mobile client to network latency than seen in environments where no proxy is used, in particular, only one full round trip from client to server is necessary regardless of the number of resources referenced by a web page. In addition, we find that the ideal location for a push proxy minimizes the latency between the proxy and the servers that the mobile client accesses through it, in contrast to traditional proxies which are best deployed in a manner that minimizes the latency between client and proxy.