EdgeCourier: An Edge-hosted Personal Service for Low-bandwidth Document Synchronization in Mobile Cloud Storage Services

Using cloud storage to automatically back up content changes when editing documents is an everyday scenario. We demonstrate that current cloud storage services can cause unnecessary bandwidth consumption, especially for office suite documents, in this common scenario. Specifically, even with incremental synchronization approach in place, existing cloud storage services still incur whole-file transmission every time when the document file is synchronized. We analyze the problem causes in depth, and propose EdgeCourier, a system to address the problem. We also propose the concept of edge-hosed personal service (EPS), which has many benefits, such as helping deploy EdgeCourier easily in practice. We have prototyped the EdgeCourier system, deployed it in the form of EPS in a lab environment, and performed extensive experiments for evaluation. Evaluation results suggest that our prototype system can effectively reduce document synchronization bandwidth with negligible overheads.