Poster: a framework for instant mobile web browsing with smart prefetching and caching

Abstract

Mobile users often suffer from a slow page loading time due to intermittently connected wireless networks and increasing size of mobile Web pages. Although existing approaches of prefetching and caching are widely used to reduce the browsing latency, they may fail to work effectively because most Web page visits are singletons and the cache hit ratio is unsatisfying. In this work, we design and implement a framework to reduce Web browsing latency for mobile users with a smart prefetching strategy and caching mechanism. The prefetching strategy leverages the skSLRU model, which predicts and prefetches Web pages based on their contents with consideration of user contexts and the devices' status such as power consuming and cellular data usage. And our caching mechanism mainly consider the resources like CSS and JavaScript files shared among Web pages in a website. Moreover, instead of using RAM, we use ROM, the internal flash memory of devices to store cached resources with proper lifecycle so as to avoid the useful resources to be untimely evicted or expired and thus improve the hit ratio. Our evaluations show that 90% of the homepages and 60% of other pages are fetched before users' visiting, and the page loading time is no more than one second.