Optimizing Offline Access to Social Network Content on Mobile Devices

In this paper, we explore the problem of supporting efficient access to social media contents on social network sites for mobile devices without requiring mobile users to be online all the time. We propose and implement a broker/proxy based architecture that stages data at a broker/proxy, and selectively downloads to the mobile device only those contents that have a high likelihood of being viewed. The system determines the relevance of social media updates that continuously arrive (e.g., Facebook friend updates) for each user. Using knowledge of this relevance and current network/system conditions, we develop scheduling algorithms that determine which social contents are sent to the devices. We develop an Android app providing offline access to Facebook. Our experimental results indicate that our system is energy efficient, which saves energy by 6.9 times for WiFi and 9.1 times for cellular connections. We also use data traces gathered from our app to further drive extensive simulation based evaluations which show that our proposed algorithms provide efficient facilities for tuning the system's performance.