Network Agile Preference-Based Prefetching for Mobile Devices

Abstract: For mobile devices, communication via cellular networks consumes more energy, and has a lower data rate than WiFi networks, and suffers an expensive limited data plan. However the WiFi network coverage range and density are smaller than those of the cellular networks. In this work, we present a behavior-aware and preference-based approach to prefetch news webpages that a user will be interested in and access, by exploiting the WiFi network connections to reduce the energy and monetary cost. In our solution, we first design an efficient preference learning algorithm based on keywords and URLs visited, which will keep track of the user's changing interests. By predicting the appearance and durations of the WiFi network connections, our prefetch approach then optimizes when to prefetch what webpages to maximize the user experience while lowing the prefetch cost. Our prefetch approach exploits the idle period of WiFi connections to reduce the tail-energy consumption. We implement our approach in iPhone. Our extensive evaluations show that our system achieves about 60% hit ratio, saves about 50% cellular data usage, and reduces the energy cost by 9%.