Data Caching for Mobile Applications to Reduce Energy Consumption in Mobile Devices (12343N)
Applications
Patent
Opportunity
Advantages
IDA Technology Roadmap 2012 This technology falls in the following categories of Singapore's IDA Infocomm Technology Roadmap 2012:
For more information on this technology contact: |
Technology Overview
This technology introduces two complimentary approaches to enable caching on mobile devices for energy savings: (a) a response cache; and (b) an object cache. The response cache stores content at the document level, i.e., it stores full HTTP responses. This approach is generic across mobile applications in that responses from any application can be stored in cache. The centerpiece of this approach is a caching architecture and method that monitors the incoming and outgoing network streams for all mobile applications to capture incoming cacheable content, as well as outgoing requests for content potentially available from the cache. While full response caching can be effective in a number of scenarios, particularly in situations where the data underlying all the content in the response changes at roughly the same rate, not all mobile applications have this property. Dynamically changing data, where the data underlying the content in a response may change at varying rates, requires a different approach. The object cache approach takes advantage of a commonly-used format for data interchange in mobile applications called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Here, mobile applications receive not HTML markup, but rather data objects in JSON notation, and the applications are coded to know how to display the objects. Each JSON object represents a coherent, well-encapsulated portion of data that serves as a natural granularity for caching. By caching JSON objects separately, rather than a full HTTP response, more finely-grained data can be stored, which is more appropriate for dynamic content. Rather than retrieving all the objects needed to a mobile application request, available cached objects can be used to compose new response in concert with new objects (not available from cache) received from the back-end server. The caching scheme is implemented as an easy-to-integrate library so that developers can add caching capability by calling simple APIs, and is completely transparent to the end user. Development Status Technology Readiness Level 5 on the scale by the Ministry of Defence Singapore. About the Research Group Kaushik Dutta and Anindya Datta are faculty of Information Systems department at the School of Computing in NUS. Both of them have in-depth industry experience particularly in venture backed startups. Prior to NUS, Kaushik was a faculty at Florida International University. Prior to NUS, Anindya was a faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology. Kaushik and Anindya have several patents in the area of middleware caching. |