Lenin S. Ravindranath, Jitendra Padhye, Ratul Mahajan, Hari Balakrishnan
The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, PA, November 2013
Providing consistent response times to users of mobile applications is
challenging because there are several variable delays between the
start of a user's request and the completion of the response. These
delays include location lookup, sensor data acquisition, radio
wake-up, network transmissions, and processing on both the client and
server. To allow applications to achieve consistent response times in
the face of these variable delays, this paper presents the design,
implementation, and evaluation of the Timecard system. Timecard
provides two abstractions: the first returns the time elapsed since
the user started the request, and the second returns an estimate of
the time it would take to transmit the response from the server to the
client and process the response at the client. With these
abstractions, the server can adapt its processing time to control the
end-to-end delay for the request. Implementing these abstractions
requires Timecard to track delays across multiple asynchronous
activities, handle time skew between client and server, and estimate
network transfer times. Experiments with Timecard incorporated into
two mobile applications show that the end-to-end delay is within 50 ms
of the target delay of 1200 ms over 90% of the time.
[PDF (847KB)]
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{ravindranath2013timecard,
author = "Lenin S. Ravindranath and Jitendra Padhye and Ratul Mahajan and Hari Balakrishnan",
title = "{Timecard: Controlling User-Perceived Delays in Server-Based Mobile Applications}",
booktitle = {The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles},
year = {2013},
month = {November},
address = {Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, PA}
}