Web caching on smartphones: Ideal vs. reality

Web caching in mobile networks is critical due to the unprecedented cellular traffic growth that far exceeds the deployment of cellular infrastructures. Caching on handsets is particularly important as it eliminates all network-related overheads. We perform the first network-wide study of the redundant transfers caused by inefficient web caching on handsets, using a dataset collected from 3 million smartphone users of a large commercial cellular carrier, as well as another five-month-long trace contributed by 20 smartphone users. Our findings suggest that redundant transfers contribute 18% and 20% of the total HTTP traffic volume in the two datasets. Also they are responsible for 17% of the bytes, 7% of the radio energy consumption, 6% of the signaling load, and 9% of the radio resource utilization of all cellular data traffic in the second dataset. Most of such redundant transfers are caused by the smartphone web caching implementation that does not fully support or strictly follow the protocol specification, or by developers not fully utilizing the caching support provided by the libraries. This is further confirmed by our caching tests of 10 popular HTTP libraries and mobile browsers. Improving the cache implementation will bring considerable reduction of network traffic volume, cellular resource consumption, handset energy consumption, and user-perceived latency, benefiting both cellular carriers and customers.