Timecard: controlling user-perceived delays in server-based mobile applications
Name
sosp13.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
847.39 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d51616152a0d3c90881f58d2b640fd4d
Author(s)
Ravindranath, Lenin
Padhye, Jitendra
Mahajan, Ratul
Balakrishnan, Hari
Date Issued
November 3, 2013
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Ravindranath, Lenin, Padhye, Jitendra, Mahajan, Ratul and Balakrishnan, Hari. 2013. "Timecard: controlling user-perceived delays in server-based mobile applications."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
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. © 2013 ACM.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2517349.2522717
