Energy-efficient and cost-effective web API invocations with transfer size reduction for mobile mashup applications

Recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the extensive coverage of wireless networks have enabled numerous mobile users to access Web resources with smartphones. Mobile mashup applications are very attractive to smartphone users due to specialized services and user-friendly GUIs. However, to offer new services through the integration of Web resources via Web API invocations, mobile mashup applications suffer from high energy consumption and long response time. In this paper, we propose a proxy system and two techniques to reduce the size of data transfer, thereby enabling mobile mashup applications to achieve energy-efficient and cost-effective Web API invocations. Specifically, we design an API query language that allows mobile mashup applications to readily specify and obtain desired information by instructing a proxy to filter unnecessary information returned from Web API servers. We also devise an image multi-get module, which results in mobile mashup applications with smaller transfer sizes by combining multiple images and adjusting the quality, scale, or resolution of the images. With the proposed proxy and techniques, a mobile mashup application can rapidly retrieve Web resources via Web API invocations with lower energy consumption due to a smaller number of HTTP requests and responses as well as smaller response bodies. Experimental results show that the proposed proxy system and techniques significantly reduce transfer size, response time, and energy consumption of mobile mashup applications.