LinCa: A Page Loading Time Optimization Approach for Users Subject to Internet Access Restriction

Chen Ling, Lei Wang, Jun Lang, Qiufen Xia, Guoxuan Chang, Kun Wang, Peng Zhao

Abstract: Internet access restriction in various areas unceasingly poses inconvenience for users. Unblocked websites or web pages always accompany couple fate-to-fail links from blocked servers due to such restrictions, while users wait for a long time to see contents of these blocked/invalid links. Therefore, it is better to directly show timeout links to users for better experiences rather than making users excessively wait. In this paper, we present LinCa (Links Catcher), a novel approach that fully considers the Internet access restriction and reduces page loading time on client-side by parsing all HTTP requests, and intercepting all invalid links when a web navigation starts. Thus, we first create and maintain a Rule Base to store invalid links under given access restriction rules. We then update the Rule Base periodically to cover as many invalid links as possible and remove links that become valid. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness of LinCa through experiments by building and deploying a Chrome extension. Experimental results show that LinCa can reduce page loading time with average 28.12% of original page loading time for our data sets.