Delay-tolerant and loss-tolerant data transfer for mobile applications

摘要

A method supports data communication in a mobile application by specifying in the mobile application a program intent and one or more course or fine-grained properties of data objects in terms of tolerance to delay and loss; selecting a transfer policy for a set of data objects based on the application intent; receiving and coalescing intents of one or more applications for object data for the one or more applications; crafting an aggregate transfer policy, and communicating data from one or more applications as an aggregate based on the aggregate transfer policy to programmatically incorporate and benefit from tolerance to delay in the transfer of data.

主权项

1. A method to communicate data in a mobile application, comprising:
specifying in the mobile application a program intent and one or more course or fine-grained properties of data objects in terms of tolerance to delay and loss; providing a Mobile Application Programming Interface (API) for writing apps for mobile devices that allows an application to specify the course or fine-grained properties of data objects in terms of their tolerance to delay and loss and to handle asynchronous events generated as a result of a data item being transferred or lost, if a notification is desired by the application; using a network transfer protocol between a mobile device and a cloud service to coalesce intents of multiple applications for individual data objects or for and aggregate and to decide on a transfer policy for a set of data objects based on application intent; capturing factors including network type, network characteristics, server load, and system-wide metrics of interest for the network transfer protocol to determine a schedule of when and what data objects to transfer; performing optimizations to efficiently transfer data based on type of data and system-wide parameters and creating a window of opportunity through delay to pack data objects into a single transfer with opportunities for applying deduplication and compression; dynamically setting a delay in a fine-grained manner on individual collections of data by a mobile app; providing client-side software on the mobile device for the API and the client-side component of the network transfer protocol and a server-side software running as a cloud service that implements a server-side component of the network transfer protocol,wherein the server side software mirrors the client-side software for delay and loss tolerant data transfer for the downstream traffic to transfer data from server to client; and
selecting a transfer policy for a set of data objects based on the application intent.