Patent Application
20190116239
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods related to systems and methods for content delivery on mobile devices and more particularly to a background client and server side gateway that accelerate connections and improve efficiency in delivering content.
The growth of mobile internet traffic has seen effective ways to increase mobile user engagement by using enhanced high-quality image/video/multimedia content, in-app messages, notifications, download links, and/or ads. Moreover, brands and retailers use intelligent user targeting (i.e. serving the right ads at the right moment), innovative rich-media ad creatives (i.e. using display, video ads) through mobile web/apps to increase sales, building customer relationships, and improve brand loyalty. This leads to increasing use of network bandwidth for downloading and rendering high quality content on devices.
Downloading internet resources poses a serious bottleneck on the network at times when the network load is high. Users need to wait for significant amounts of time to access the app/web content until all the links and references are downloaded and rendered on the app/websites to be visible, thereby degrading user experience. One of the performance optimization techniques applied to load internet resources is prefetching, where the content is downloaded in advance, stored in the device cache, and loaded within apps and websites when the user clicks the content. However, this technique provides for limited improvement when the network load is high.
As such, additional improvements are needed to provide a seamless user experience ensuring low network load on operator networks.
According to various embodiments, a system for delivering content to a mobile device on one or more mobile networks is disclosed. The system includes an ad-server on the mobile device. The ad-server includes a mobile acceleration client (MAC) that is configured to pre-fetch cached web content or advertisements received from a mobile acceleration gateway (MAG) when the mobile device is being connected to wifi, on a cellular network, and/or being connected to a cellular network with available unused capacity.
According to various embodiments, a method for delivering content to a mobile device on one or more mobile networks is disclosed. The method includes configuring an ad-server on the mobile device to include a mobile acceleration client (MAC). The MAC is configured to pre-fetch cached web content or advertisements received from a mobile acceleration gateway (MAG) when the mobile device is being connected to wifi, on a cellular network, and/or being connected to a cellular network with available unused capacity.
Various other features and advantages will be made apparent from the following detailed description and the drawings.
In order for the advantages of the invention to be readily understood, a more particular description of the invention briefly described above will be rendered by reference to specific embodiments that are illustrated in the appended drawings. Understanding that these drawings depict only exemplary embodiments of the invention and are not, therefore, to be considered to be limiting its scope, the invention will be described and explained with additional specificity and detail through the use of the accompanying drawings, in which:
According to various embodiments, disclosed herein is a system and method for a mobile device standalone background service, referred to as a Mobile Acceleration Client (MAC), that provides common services to third party mobile apps enabling app and mobile web acceleration. This background service interacts with a server side gateway, referred to as a Mobile Acceleration Gateway (MAG), which performs acceleration of connections and gathers intelligence about downloaded content through crowd sourcing. Intelligence in the MAG is used to identify the most popular content in apps and websites, as well as provide a cache for such content for improving server side efficiency in delivering such content.
The MAC works with the MAG to pre-fetch popular content in the apps that subscribe to the service. The MAC may also extend the service for sponsored advertisements for registered mobile apps, significantly improving the speed of delivery of advertisements and content. Prefetching of advertisements and content may additionally be done at advantageous times, such as when the device is on wifi or when a cellular network is strong. The prefetched content is stored in a device cache and made available to be pulled when a mobile user launches an app. The MAC can be implemented as an SDK for third party mobile apps to register for the service, or may be implemented as a mobile app that launches a background service for all apps on the device. In either case, the system reduces the data cost to deliver a mobile ad, improves app acceleration, improve ad-displaying quality, and increases ad-click authenticity.
According to various embodiments, the system may generally operate as follows:
(1) The user of a device is presented with a selection page—either through an application or a website. On the selection page the user may select areas of interest and opt-in to view advertisements in exchange of incentives such as a reward.
(2) The MAC, which runs on the background, pre-fetches relevant advertisements and caches them on the device. The MAC essentially performs the function of an ad-server on the device.
(3) One in embodiment, an Ad-SDK is provided to applications and websites, who in turn embed the SDK inside their inventory. The Ad-SDK contacts the ad-server running in the background whenever there is an opportunity to show an ad to the user.
(4) The ad-server or MAC serves a locally cached advertisement to the user which is relevant to the user and aligns with the user's selection.
According to various embodiments, this disclosure encompasses an accelerated download system that can be used at the server and mobile client to minimize network delays for downloading videos, images, advertisements, multimedia content and other web resources. The most expensive leg of the network comprises the cellular network where the latency is the highest. The MAC and the MAG work together to reduce the number of interactive connection open/close on the cellular network and the number of DNS resolution calls on the cellular network by creating a tunnel that allows connections and IP resolution to be multiplexed on to a single connection between the MAC and the MAG.
There is an incremental cost to downloading a resource if that resource is not consumed by the end-user, in which case the download consumes both network bandwidth and the device resources but not useful for the user. The system includes crowd sourced intelligence to create a list of web resources for that brand and the likelihood of the resource being consumed by the end user. This crowd sourced intelligence is combined with the brand indication on the back-end of which resources have a high likelihood of being consumed by the end user. This list of resources with a probability of being consumed higher than a configurable threshold is provided to the MAC, which then pre-fetches these resources to make it readily available to the user when the user is browsing the brand's website.
According to various embodiments,
The ad-server 10 has intelligence to determine the number of ads to pre-fetch for a registered mobile application based on the mobile user's application user-behavior. For example, if a user uses a mobile application twice a day and visits three application pages on average with one interstitial ad and one video ad, the ad-server 10 will pre-fetch two ads of each type for this application in a day. The ad-server 10 preloads the cached ads for registered application, when the user launches the application, and the application requests an ad, irrespective of user-click. The ad-server 10 stores the cached ads when the mobile user powers off or re-boots the device, and restores the pre-fetched ads to cache when the device restarts. The ad-server 10 ensures the display of a pre-fetched, cached ad, and only display once so as not to break the number of impression analytics maintained by the demand side platform of the ad bidding, serving chain. The ad-server 10 can request sponsored ads or ads with data rewards from a backend DSP 36. Also, the backend DSP 36 can push data rewards to applications. The ad-server 10 interacts with the backend mobile data reward service to authenticate and authorize the mobile user for data reward ads of user's interests. The ad-server 10 will interact with backend mobile data reward service to top-up the user account for data rewarded when the user completes the action associated with the reward.
The system may further include a portal interface 16 to allow advertisers to sponsor advertisements on different operator networks 18 and to configure sponsored ad campaigns. The portal interface 16 further allows individual advertisers to configure ads to be sponsored or can be pushed into the subscriber devices during valley or when network capacity is high. The operator network 18 may be implemented as a single network or a combination of multiple networks. The operator network 18 may include but is not limited to wireless telecommunications networks, Zigbee, or other cellular communication networks involving 3G, 4G, 5G, and/or LTE. As illustrated by
The system may further include cloud components 20 such as such as a network capacity forecast module 22, an ISP (IP to network operator translator) module 24, a sponsored data discovery module 26, a sponsored user registration module 28, an authentication and authorization module 30, and a data analytics and data rewards module 32. The OMS cloud components 20 are responsible for service discovery, registration authentication, and authorization of any request for sponsored data by the device ad-server 10 for a specific operator deployment. The OMS cloud components 20 include a global carrier discovery module 26 which locates the carrier or operator network in respective countries. The OMS cloud components 20 include a user registration module 28 responsible for registering the user to sponsored ad services and generating UUID in a cellular network on being contacted by the ad services during its initialization phase. The OMS cloud components 20 include an authentication module 30 to authenticate each request made by the device ad-server 10 by matching application type, UUID, and/or ads sponsored with campaign configuration details. When contacted by the device ad-server 10, the authentication module 30 is responsible for authorizing a configured list of ads likely to be sponsored by the app in use on the mobile device. The OMS cloud components 20 include a network capacity forecast module 22 that is configured with an online learning algorithm to learn cell network capacity from crowd sourced RF data and notifies the device ad-server 10 at time of high network capacity, i.e., a valley. The OMS cloud components 20 include a domain name system and internet service provider module 24 responsible for redirecting sponsored ad traffic (ad download, share, view, buy, and/or sell) to load balanced gateway and re-validating the user's presence in a cellular network before sending sponsored ads, respectively. The OMS cloud components 20 includes ad-analytics 32 that maintains an accounting of sponsored ads and sponsored content fetched through the MAG 34 by each device per app level. The ad-analytics 32 holds statistics of pre-loaded content downloaded by the MAG 34 based on gateway recommendation, content partner recommendation, and/or mobile user's preference from apps or web sites.
The system may further include a mobile acceleration gateway (MAG) 34 to pre-fetch and store content, which is then downloadable by the MAC 12. According to various embodiments, the MAG 34 is responsible for pre-fetching and caching user relevant advertisements and content from an ad-ecosystem partner (both in Wi-Fi and cellular network) by working in collaboration with content partners to integrate their API system to download pre-loadable content. This content is in turn is fetched/downloaded by the MAC 12, cached and pre-loaded by mobile clients in the app. This is further illustrated in
The MAG 34 supports intelligent learning algorithms that learn popular content fetched by apps through crowd-sourcing. The MAG 34 then creates a list of content prioritized by popularity that can be fetched by the MAC 12, known as a cache target list (CTL). The MAG 34 can also cache the pre-fetched content.
As shown in
(1) Robust tunneling, such as but not limited to a VPN or a persistent http tunnel, between the MAC 12 and the MAG 34 where a single connection is set up over which all resources are downloaded.
(2) Efficient compression techniques and network aware algorithms that are not compressed by brands.
(3) TCP tuning by controlling TCP window size.
(4) Downloading content that is already compressed by brands.
As the cloud components are deployed regionally across the globe, the MAG 34 which is nearest to the device can download the content from a content server 36, cache the content, and serve the content to the device via the MAC 12 during good network conditions or in Wi-Fi.
The MAG 34 works as an efficient scheduler to schedule the download of suitable content from the content partner to itself (based on configured campaign, rating and popularity of the content), cache it and then trigger download to the device by receiving notifications of the network conditions from network capacity forecast module, as shown in
The ad-server 10 communicates with different demand side platform (DSP) ad-servers 36 to fetch targeted advertisements and OMS cloud components 20 to access sponsored ad content. The DSP 36 allows sponsors, such as content partners, advertisers, and/or app developers, to register ads for their specific apps through the ad portal 16. The ad portal 16 allows different sponsorship campaigns to be turned on or off by sponsors to target different ads to different user segments at period of lower network utilization.
The device ad-server 10 can run as a single service at the device level to serve all registered apps/websites/SDKs. The device ad-server 10 can be configured as a standalone client to be downloaded from an app store or mobile campaign services. This is illustrated in
As illustrated by
The MAC 12 uses a cache target list (CTL) shared by the MAG 34 to pre-fetch content from the MAG 34 which have a high likelihood of being consumed by the end user. The MAC 12 preserves impressions and click tracking by caching ads in cache storage 42 that have not been displayed yet. The ads displayed to the user once expire immediately. To display the same ads in future, the app communicates with the ad-service 10 to pre-fetch ads again. The device ad-server 10 maintains a database 40 that contains details like per application caching limit, ads cached based on user movements, and type of ads pre-fetched. The mobile device cache 14 containing the cache database 40 and cache storage 42 is further illustrated in
The device cache 14 provides cross and multi operator support by storing cached items at the device cache storage 14. This is further illustrated in
The pre-fetched ads will be displayed by the mobile device as apps wake up when being used. The MAC 12 on the ad-server 10 is equipped with a configuration limit to download a certain percentage of most popular content through the MAG 34. Prefetching is linked with user specified ad formats if available; otherwise, prefetching includes all available ad formats as requested by the app. This is further illustrated in
According to various embodiments, as illustrated in
According to various embodiments, the ad-server 10 is responsible for initiating a call to Global Discovery Service with cellular MCC or MNC to locate the OMS gateway associated with the specific carrier deployment. In a non-cellular network, cached ads displayed by apps pass through the MAG 34 but are not accounted. This is further illustrated in
According to various embodiments, the system may include an ad analytics module 32 as part of the cloud components 20. The device ad-server 10 can send events to the ad analytics module 32 to learn one or more of the following: the number of ads being pre-fetched per app; statistics of popular ads fetched as listed by the MAG 34; statistics of sponsored ads or ads with data rewards; the number of pre-fetched ads being displayed per app; time duration during which the ad is cached before user views it; and the ratio of ads being served by the DSP during ad pre-fetch. The ad analytics 32 may also understand and analyze user-interest and behavior at any given time and location to fine-tune the timing and type of ads to pre-fetch.
According to various embodiments, the MAC 12 works with the MAG 34 by using collective content prefetching in the following manner. The MAC 12 and MAG 34 work together to reduce the number of connections that are setup by setting up a single connection over which all resources are downloaded in a much higher acceleration than normal download, in a similar manner to a VPN or a persistent http tunnel. Where applicable, the MAC 12 and MAG 34 work using compressed data, unless already compressed by the brand. The MAG 34 creates a brand partner specific list of resources, the CTL, which have a high likelihood of being consumed by the end user. The CTL is shared with the MAC 12. The MAC 12 pre-fetches these resources either on the cellular network to improve the perceived user experience and/or on a lower cost network (either on wifi or on underutilized time on the cellular network) to gain advantage on the cost of mobile data. As such, an instant delivery of content and advertisements provides a great user experience. Additionally, data rewards may be given to mobile user for viewing preloaded content or ads. Allowing a mobile user to choose advertising options based on a user's product and services interests, subject and theme interests, allows for the download of high demand content.
According to various embodiments, disclosed herein is an integrated client-server solution with mobile client incorporated in a device, intermediate server-side gateway, and back-end cloud components along with a 3rd party content server. The system may be implemented as a standalone application or as an SDK, to be either downloaded from an application store (such as Android, Windows, or IOS) or to be pushed into the mobile device by a network operator when there is unused capacity available in the network.
The following advantages and value are readily apparent from the system and methods described above. App and mobile web acceleration is provided by minimizing DNS resolution time and connection-setup time. The MAC and MAG work together to reduce the number of connections that are setup by setting up a single connection over which all resources are downloaded. The speed of delivering content to devices is enhanced through prefetch and preload. Mobile data charges are reduced by pre-fetching ads with sponsored mobile data use, or pre-fetch the most popular content when the user device is on wifi or when the network capacity is under-utilized. Ads may also be fetched to improve the user experience with no advantage on the cost using regularly priced mobile data.
Mobile ad displaying quality is improved by playing the ad from the cache on the mobile device. The cache can provide a shared memory for downloaded advertisements and/or popular, high-rated content across apps and browsers. IAB category filtering and ad prioritization are available per ad-ecosystem partner without any loss in functionality in order to provide the right ad to the right user. Displaying pre-loaded ads upon launch of an app can work with both private placement of ads and ad auctions. Ad clicking through rate and conversion rate is improved by requesting and/or downloading the most popular ads, sponsoring mobile ad data usage, and providing data reward incentives.
A learning algorithm is built-in to decide the number of ads to be pre-fetched for a mobile application during 24-hour period, reducing resource usage from over fetch and avoiding ad staleness. An intelligent downloader/ad-fetch module is included that downloads advertisements from the cellular network by effectively using radio resources during high network capacity. An intelligent learning algorithm at the MAG can rate content based on their popularity, demand, and usage statistics gathered through crowd-sourcing. The CTL can be cached at the MAG and downloaded by the MAC. An efficient transport mechanism is provided by enabling network-aware algorithms, TCP/UDP tuning, and/or text compression when content is cached through the MAG.
Easy, one-time integration with mobile apps is provided. As pre-fetched are directly linked to a user's preference or choice. The ad-server with MAC as a standalone background service or as an SDK integrated with an ad-network provides targeted location-based ads to end users, enabling them to use or download ads with minimal to no data cost. Apps are allowed to selectively choose and display ads when mobile subscribers use such apps, by fetching them from the network during periods of available network capacity.
A fast, easy to use, responsive user-interface allows subscribers to enter preferred ads at any given location. Sponsored ad-content can be embedded with its own visual style and presentation format based on device screen size and model.
A detailed per user and per app analytics, with details of pre-fetched content, based on types of sponsored advertisements being viewed at different times of available network capacity is available. Cost-efficient retargeting opportunities across several apps is thus increased. It also allows content partners to push the next relevant ad to the user. Ad-ecosystem analytics are accurate and verifiable, allowing the ad incidence to be verified by a third party even though the ad is delivered to the apps through the ad-cache service.
The system can work independently and seamlessly across cross-operator networks while mobile subscribers switch SIMs or roams across different networks. It's capable of running in dual-SIM or quadruple SIM devices as the cache works at device. The scalable, interoperable solution can be deployed in any operator network integrated with any ad-network or 3rd-party app. The system has no dependencies on carrier network and/or mobile device platform, make, or model.
The disclosed approach enables easy integration mechanism to diverse mobile platforms across multiple operator networks (3G, 4G, 5G, femto cell) to enhance accelerated content/ad pre-fetching and pre-loading improving end user experience. The mechanism prioritizes different categories of content and/or advertisements based on its usage statistics from crowd-sourcing to fetch them in advance in good network conditions or wifi at a higher connection speed so that they are pre-loaded by apps or ad-network websites and consumed by end users.
The system allows for an easy distribution strategy by distributing as a push model at the operator-end or a pull model by fetching the service at the subscriber end from an app store. Therefore, app monetization is ensured for ad-publishers or distributors and operators can effectively utilize the network by pushing this service during low network usage. As subscribers are provided with efficient techniques for using mobile radio resources and granted rewards during ad-downloading at times of low network usage, their data cost for viewing the ads or browsing content remains low. This acts as an added incentive for subscribers to use mobile data, since they can seamlessly browse content at a lower data cost. Additionally, brands also have an advantage of lower data cost in cases where the data is sponsored or the brand is paying for the data usage.
It is understood that the above-described embodiments are only illustrative of the application of the principles of the present invention. The present invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from its spirit or essential characteristics. All changes that come within the meaning and range of equivalency of the claims are to be embraced within their scope. Thus, while the present invention has been fully described above with particularity and detail in connection with what is presently deemed to be the most practical and preferred embodiment of the invention, it will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art that numerous modifications may be made without departing from the principles and concepts of the invention as set forth in the claims.
This application claims priority to provisional application 62/573,920, filed on Oct. 18, 2017, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62573920 | Oct 2017 | US |
