Performance analysis of a 2-tier caching proxy system for mobile RESTful services

Abstract

With the increasing use of smartphones and mobile applications, users access the Internet from everywhere using mobile networks. Different applications require different connectivity types or amount of data and a slow network can lead to a drastic degradation in performance. These applications usually access data on servers which are also accessible via other technologies such as websites, web service consumption or RESTful services on non-mobile clients and to ensure the same service, a single application programming interface (API) is provided. When mobile users access these services, the same traditional techniques such as SOAP based web services or RESTful services are used but these are not always appropriate. Similarly, the use of current web caching methods do not provide the same performance gain when HTTP based RESTful services are called from mobile devices. This paper proposes a 2-tier caching proxy system, which can be easily deployed and used by producers and consumers of RESTful services. This system has been implemented and tested using a live system and performance evaluation showed that a performance gain of up to 59% can be achieved along with a bandwidth reduction of 70% for service providers and 86% for clients.