Michigan researchers awarded 2018 Applied Networking Research Prize for their work on speeding up the mobile web

A team of researchers, including Prof. Harsha Madhyastha and CSE graduate students Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk and Muhammed Uluyol have received the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) for their paper, “Vroom: Accelerating the Mobile Web with Server-Aided Dependency Resolution.”

Vroom speeds up the mobile web by optimizing the end-to-end interaction between mobile devices and web servers. The researchers tested the software on 100 popular news and sports websites, and they found that Vroom cut in half the median load time on landing pages–from 10 seconds to 5.

“Vroom dramatically improves upon solutions such as proxy servers, which come with security and privacy concerns. And it complements solutions such as Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, which requires web pages to be rewritten. For any particular version of a web page, Vroom optimizes the process of loading that page,” said Prof. Madhyastha.

The new Vroom architecture bundles together resources that browsers will need to fully load pages. When a web server receives a request from a browser, in addition to returning the requested resource, the server also informs the browser about other dependent resources it will need to fetch.

The researchers presented their findings at the ACM SIGCOMM conference on Aug. 24, 2017.

The Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) recognizes the best new ideas in networking, and brings them to the IETF and IRTF especially in cases where they would not otherwise see much exposure or discussion. The ANRP is awarded for recent results in applied networking research that are relevant for transitioning into shipping Internet products and related standardization efforts.