Supporting diverse mobile applications with client profiles

We describe a best-effort scheme to support diverse applications in low-bandwidth mobile networks. The improvements due to our scheme are motivated by the observation that different applications typically have different preferences for latency and recency of data, which are not considered by traditional caching techniques. In our scheme, clients express their preferences using voluntary profiles: application-specific targets for latency and recency of data. We describe a complete framework for incorporating profile-based decision making into the cache utilization, downloading, and scheduling decisions at a mobile base station. We analyze the performance of profiles using simulations. Our results show that even simple profiles are useful in discriminating the service received by different applications, and using profiles in both caching and scheduling decisions improves performance. Further, clients who give uncooperative profiles increase the latencies of their own applications, thus providing all clients an incentive to provide fair and accurate profiles.