PALOMA

Summary

Reducing network latency in mobile applications is an effective way of improving the mobile user experience and has tangible economic benefits. This paper presents PALOMA, a novel client-centric technique for reducing the network latency by prefetching HTTP requests in Android apps. Our work leverages string analysis and callback control-flow analysis to automatically instrument apps using PALOMA’s rigorous formulation of scenarios that address “what” and “when” to prefetch. PALOMA has been shown to incur significant runtime savings (several hundred milliseconds per prefetchable HTTP request), both when applied on a reusable evaluation benchmark we have developed and on real applications.

Publications

Yixue Zhao, Marcelo Schmitt Laser, Yingjun Lyu, and Nenad Medvidovic. “Leveraging Program Analysis to Reduce User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Applications.” Accepted for the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018). [Paper Link][Poster][Presentation][Slides]

Repositories

• PALOMA Analysis
• PALOMA Proxy
• MBM Server
• MBM Test Cases

Contact

Yixue Zhao [website] [email: yixue.zhao [AT] usc.edu]