Navigation-aware and personalized prefetching of network requests in Android apps

I. Malavolta, F. Nocera, P. Lago, M. Mongiello. USENIX 2019

[IEEE]

Prefetching network requests has been advocated as a highly effective way of reducing network latency experienced by the user since it allows network responses to be generated immediately from a local cache. In this paper we discuss how user navigation patterns can be used for developing navigation-aware techniques for personalized prefetching of network requests of Android apps. The proposed idea opens for a new family of prefetching opportunities since it focusses at a higher level of abstraction with respect to state-of-the-art approaches for network requests prefetching. The proposed idea allows the development of approaches which adapt their prefetching behaviour according to the unique navigation patterns each user exhibits while interacting with a mobile app.