An Edge-Hosted Personal Service for Low-Bandwidth Document Synchronization in Mobile Cloud Storage Services
EdgeCourier: An Edge-hosted Personal Service for Low-bandwidth Document Synchronization in Mobile Cloud Storage Services Pengzhan Hao, Yongshu Bai, Xin Zhang, and Yifan Zhang Department of Computer Science SUNY Binghamton Binghamton, NY ABSTRACT ated, and can be further synchronized in real-time to other Using cloud storage to automatically back up content changes devices owned by the user or his collaborators. We name when editing documents is an everyday scenario. We demon- this common usage scenario as cloud-storage-backed mobile strate that current cloud storage services can cause unneces- document editing. sary bandwidth consumption, especially for office suite doc- Low-bandwidth sync is important for cloud-storage-backed uments, in this common scenario. Specifically, even with in- mobile document editing. However, our motivation study cremental synchronization approach in place, existing cloud (§3.2) shows that exiting cloud storage services incur high storage services still incur whole-file transmission every time network traffic on mobile devices when synchronizing doc- when the document file is synchronized. We analyze the ument files, especially for office suite documents [9, 10, 34, problem causes in depth, and propose EdgeCourier, a sys- 47, 63], such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presenta- tem to address the problem. We also propose the concept tion documents, which constitute the most commonly used of edge-hosed personal service (EPS), which has many ben- editable document formats in practice [18, 33]. Specifically, efits, such as helping deploy EdgeCourier easily in practice. most cloud storage services transmit the whole document We have prototyped the EdgeCourier system, deployed it in file from the mobile device to cloud storage every time when the form of EPS in a lab environment, and performed exten- the user saves the file, even for a small change in the file sive experiments for evaluation.
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