Looxy: Web Access Optimization for Mobile Applications with a Local Proxy

Efficient web caching and prefetching can help optimize mobile application web accesses through eliminating network traffic and reducing human perceived latency. However, due to limited storage and computation resources, it is not practical to implement web caching and prefetching mechanisms on mobile devices such as smartphones. This paper proposes Looxy, a mechanism to optimize mobile application web accesses by offloading the caching and prefetching functionalities to a local proxy. As a result, mobile applications can benefit from these optimizations without incurring extra computation and storage overhead on smartphones. Looxy does not require modifications to the applications or mobile operating systems, making it applicable to different mobile operating systems and devices. Experimental results show that Looxy can save about 20% of Internet traffic with real user behaviors and improve application response speed by about 1.8X.