Flywheel: Google’s Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web
Victor Agababov, Michael Buettner, Victor Chudnovsky, Mark Cogan, Ben Greenstein, Shane McDaniel, and Michael Piatek, Google, Inc.; Colin Scott, University of California, Berkeley; Matt Welsh and Bolian Yin, Google Inc.
Mobile devices are increasingly the dominant Internet access technology. Nevertheless, high costs, data caps, and throttling are a source of widespread frustration, and a significant barrier to adoption in emerging markets. This paper presents Flywheel, an HTTP proxy service that extends the life of mobile data plans by compressing responses in-flight between origin servers and client browsers. Flywheel is integrated with the Chrome web browser and reduces the size of proxied web pages by 50% for a median user. We report measurement results from millions of users as well as experience gained during three years of operating and evolving the production service at Google.
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BibTeX
@inproceedings {188962,
author = {Victor Agababov and Michael Buettner and Victor Chudnovsky and Mark Cogan and Ben Greenstein and Shane McDaniel and Michael Piatek and Colin Scott and Matt Welsh and Bolian Yin},
title = {Flywheel: {Google{\textquoteright}s} Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web},
booktitle = {12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 15)},
year = {2015},
isbn = {978-1-931971-218},
address = {Oakland, CA},
pages = {367--380},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi15/technical-sessions/presentation/agababov},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may
}
