Characterizing mobile^*-box applications

With the increasing use of multiple electronic devices including tablets, PCs, and mobile devices, Personal Cloud Storage (PCS) services, such as Dropbox and Box, have gained huge popularity. Recent research has used the PC clients of a few PCS services to study the network architectures and performance of these services. The mobile clients deserve a further study because the study of PC clients does not necessarily represent the system and network demand with mobile clients. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic investigation on six popular PCS services to reveal their internals and measure their performance. By dissecting their protocols and conducting cross-layer examinations, we obtain interesting observations, identify design issues, and suggest solutions to remedy these issues. Moreover, we propose an efficient method to measure the response latency of PCS servers by exploiting their open APIs.