Content Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach by Zhenhua Li Yafei Dai Guihai Chen & Yunhao Liu

Author:Zhenhua Li, Yafei Dai, Guihai Chen & Yunhao Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

5.8 Conclusion

In recent years, the Internet has gained enormous penetration all over the world. However, basic Internet services, like downloading (large) files, remains an issue in most developing countries as a consequence of low-quality network connections. To improve users’ downloading experiences, offline downloading services have been proposed and widely deployed in China.

The idea of offline downloading is mainly embodied in two different types of approaches: (1) the cloud-based approach and (2) the smart AP-based approach. Unfortunately, the two approaches are confusing to end users since they offer different strengths and weaknesses (the so-called “selection dilemma”). Our study addresses this dilemma with in-depth analysis of a large-scale cloud-based offline downloading system, as well as comprehensive benchmark experiments of three popular smart APs. Our study shows that the two approaches are subject to distinct performance bottlenecks, while also being complementary to each other. Driven by the study, we build an ODR middleware to help users achieve the best expected performance.

In the future, we envision that offline downloading will become a widely used technology for enhancing the Internet experiences of users across both the developing world and the developed world. For example, people start to build a variety of useful Internet services on top of cloud-based offline downloading systems, such as cloud-based media converters (e.g., Cloud Transcoder [73]) and cloud-accelerated web browsers (e.g., QQ mobile web browser, UCWeb browser, and Amazon Silk web browser). Our study of offline downloading provides solid experiences and valuable heuristics for the developers of similar and relevant services.

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