Exploring Cross-Application Cellular Traffic Optimization with Baidu TrafficGuard
Zhenhua Li
Weiwei Wang
Tianyin Xu
Xin Zhong
Xiang-yang Li
Yunhao Liu
Christo Wilson
Ben Y. Zhao
Proceedings of 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2016)
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Paper Abstract
As mobile cellular devices and traffic continue their rapid growth, providers
are taking larger steps to optimize traffic, with the hopes of improving user
experiences while reducing congestion and bandwidth costs. This paper presents
the design, deployment, and experiences with Baidu TrafficGuard, a cloud-based
mobile proxy that reduces cellular traffic using a network-layer VPN. The VPN
connects a client-side proxy to a centralized traffic processing cloud.
TrafficGuard works transparently across heterogeneous applications, and
effectively reduces cellular traffic by 36% and overage instances by 10.7 times
for roughly 10 million Android users in China. We discuss a large-scale cellular
traffic analysis effort, how the resulting insights guided the design of
TrafficGuard, and our experiences with a variety of traffic optimization
techniques over one year of deployment.