Network agile preference-based prefetching for mobile devices

Abstract

For mobile devices, communication via cellular networks consumes more energy than via WiFi networks, and suffers an expensive limited data plan. On the other hand, as the coverage and the density of WiFI networks are smaller than those of the cellular networks, users cannot purely rely on WiFi to access the Internet. In this work we present a behavior-aware and preference-based approach to prefetch news webpages for the user to visit in the near future, by exploiting the WiFi network connections to reduce the energy and monetary cost. We first design an efficient preference learning algorithm to keep track of the user's changing interests, and then by predicting the appearance and durations of the WiFi network connections, our prefetch approach optimizes when to prefetch to maximize the user experience while lowing the prefetch cost. Our prefetch approach also exploits the idle period of WiFi connections to reduce the tail-energy consumption. We implement our approach in iPhone and our extensive evaluations show that our system achieves about 60% hit ratio, saves about 50% cellular data usage, and reduces the energy cost by 7%.