A Hybrid Web Browser Architecture for Mobile Devices

Web browsing on mobile networks is slow in comparison to wired or Wi- Fi networks. Particularly, the connection establishment phase including DNS lookups and TCP handshakes takes a long time on mobile networks due to its long round-trip latency. In this paper, we propose a novel web browser architecture that aims to improve mobile web browsing performance. Our approach delegates the connection establishment and HTTP header field delivery tasks to a dedicated proxy server located at the joint point between the WAN and mobile network. Since the traffic for the connection establishment and HTTP header fields delivery passes only through the WAN between the proxy and web servers, our approach significantly reduces both the number and size of packets on the mobile network. Our evaluation showed that the proposed scheme reduces the number of mobile network packets by up to 42% and, consequently, the average page loading time is shortened by up to 52%.