Ravi Netravali, Anirudh Sivaraman, James Mickens, Hari Balakrishnan
17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Seoul, South Korea, June 2019
Remote dependency resolution (RDR) is a proxy-driven scheme for reducing mobile page load times; a proxy loads a requested page using a local browser, fetching the page's resources over fast proxy-origin links instead of a client's slow last-mile links. In this paper, we describe two fundamental challenges to efficient RDR proxying: the increasing popularity of encrypted HTTPS content, and the fact that, due to time-dependent network conditions and page properties, RDR proxying can actually increase load times. We solve these problems by introducing a new, secure proxying scheme for HTTPS traffic, and by implementing WatchTower, a selective proxying system that uses dynamic models of network conditions and page structures to only enable RDR when it is predicted to help. WatchTower loads pages 21.2%-41.3% faster than state-of-the-art proxies and server push systems, while preserving end-to-end HTTPS security.
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Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{netravali2019watchtower,
author = "Ravi Netravali and Anirudh Sivaraman and James Mickens and Hari Balakrishnan",
title = "{Watchtower: Fast, Secure Mobile Page Loads Using Remote Dependency Resolution}",
booktitle = {17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys)},
year = {2019},
month = {June},
address = {Seoul, South Korea}
}