Network Data Buffering for Availability Improvement of Mobile Web Applications

In recent years, we have seen an explosion in the use of smart devices. With several different competing OS platforms on these smart devices, developers have turned to web applications as an effective way to provide cross-platform services. However, because many web applications are designed to handle UI interactions locally on a user’s device and to process data remotely in the cloud, it is difficult for them to continue running while offline. In this paper, we propose a data synchronization technology that buffers and minimize network communications to address problems associated with dropped network connections as well as low bandwidth and/or high latency environments. To test the technology’s effectiveness, we applied it to some typical web applications and compared their performance in environments with dropped connections.