Exploring Cross-Application Cellular Traffic Optimization with Baidu TrafficGuard

Authors: 

Zhenhua Li, Tsinghua University and Baidu Mobile Security; Weiwei Wang, Baidu Mobile Security; Tianyin Xu, University of California, San Diego; Xin Zhong, Tsinghua University and Baidu Mobile Security; Xiang-Yang Li, Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China, and Illinois Institute of Technology; Yunhao Liu, Tsinghua University; Christo Wilson, Northeastern University; Ben Y. Zhao, University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper is part of the Operational Systems Track

Abstract: 

As mobile cellular devices and traffic continue their rapid growth, providers are taking larger steps to optimize traffic, with the hopes of improving user experiences while reducing congestion and bandwidth costs. This paper presents the design, deployment, and experiences with Baidu TrafficGuard, a cloud-based mobile proxy that reduces cellular traffic using a network-layer VPN. The VPN connects a client-side proxy to a centralized traffic processing cloud. TrafficGuard works transparently across heterogeneous applications, and effectively reduces cellular traffic by 36% and overage instances by 10.7 times for roughly 10 million Android users in China. We discuss a large-scale cellular traffic analysis effort, how the resulting insights guided the design of TrafficGuard, and our experiences with a variety of traffic optimization techniques over one year of deployment.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {194908,
author = {Zhenhua Li and Weiwei Wang and Tianyin Xu and Xin Zhong and Xiang-Yang Li and Yunhao Liu and Christo Wilson and Ben Y. Zhao},
title = {Exploring {Cross-Application} Cellular Traffic Optimization with Baidu {TrafficGuard}},
booktitle = {13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16)},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-931971-29-4},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {61--76},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi16/technical-sessions/presentation/li-zhenhua},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
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