07-03-2011, 11:27 AM
Abstract—Employees are increasingly participating in business
processes using mobile devices. Often, this is supported
by a mobile web application, which accesses various web
services in the back-end. The high latency of the mobile
network (e.g., EDGE) is perceived by the user each time
a web service is called, in addition to the time needed to
invoke the service itself. This high latency may lead to low
usability, low acceptance rate, and finally compromises the
overall process quality. To reduce the latency perceived by the
user, we present a caching architecture for web services and an
adaptive prefetching algorithm. The key characteristics of our
approach are the compatibility with major mobile browsers
and the independence of the caching proxy from the frontend
application and the back-end services. We evaluate our
approach on realistic traces of web service calls in an IT
service management scenario. The traces were generated from
handling real incidents according to the ITIL (ISO 20000)
processes. The results confirm that using our approach, the
latency perceived by the user is reduced by 24%.