QuickSync: Improving Synchronization Efficiency for Mobile Cloud Storage Services

Abstract

Mobile cloud storage services have gained phenomenal success in recent few years. In this paper, we identify, analyze, and address the synchronization (sync) inefficiency problem of modern mobile cloud storage services. Our measurement results demonstrate that existing commercial sync services fail to make full use of available bandwidth, and generate a large amount of unnecessary sync traffic in certain circumstances even though the incremental sync is implemented. For example, a minor document editing process in Dropbox may result in sync traffic 10 times that of the modification. These issues are caused by the inherent limitations of the sync protocol and the distributed architecture. Based on our findings, we propose QuickSync, a system with three novel techniques to improve the sync efficiency for mobile cloud storage services, and build the system on two commercial sync services. Our experimental results using representative workloads show that QuickSync is able to reduce up to 73.1 percent sync time in our experiment settings.