Mobile-Friendly HTTP Middleware with Screen Scrolling

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Lei Zhang, Feng Wang, Jiangchuan Liu

Published: 2018, Last Modified: 23 Jan 2026ICDCS 2018EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: The pervasive penetration of mobile smart devices has significantly enriched Internet applications and undoubtedly reshaped the way that users access Internet services. Different from traditional desktop applications, mobile Internet applications require users to input via touch screens and view outputs on the displays with considerably limited size. The significant conflict between the limited-size of touch screens and the richness of online media contents requires the mobile Internet applications to download contents way beyond the user's viewing region (referred as viewport). In this paper, we present a Mobile-Friendly HTTP middleware (MF-HTTP), which interprets user touch screen inputs and optimize the HTTP downloading of media objects to improve quality of experience (QoE) and cost efficiency. We first demystify screen scrolling in mobile operating systems and precisely break down the viewport moving process. We identify the key influential factors for media object downloading and develop an optimal download scheme. Towards building a practical middleware, we further discuss and address the implementation issues in detail. We implement a MF-HTTP prototype based on Android platforms and evaluate the performance of MF-HTTP by conducting concrete case studies on two representative applications, namely, web browsing and 360-degree video streaming.