Apparatus and methods for bandwidth saving and on-demand data delivery for a mobile device

• US 9,559,868 B2
• Filed: 06/30/2011
• Issued: 01/31/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 04/01/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Onavo Mobile Limited (Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.))
• Inventors: Rosen, Guy, Ariav, Yuval, Tiger, Roi
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen, Tammy
• Application Number:
  US13/173,619
• Publication Number:
  US 20120254327A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,042 Days
• Field of Search: 709/206, 709/203, 709/224, 707/621, 713/150
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/08 Annexed information, e.g. attachments
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/42 Mailbox-related aspects, e.g. synchronisation of mailboxes
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/58 Message adaptation for wireless communication
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/18 Information format or content conversion, e.g. adaptation by the network of the transmitted or received information for the purpose of wireless delivery to users or terminals

Abstract

A method for reducing data bandwidth usage in wireless communication comprises receiving a request from the a mobile device to provide the an e-mail message; sending a request to the an e-mail server for delivery of the e-mail message; analyzing the e-mail message delivered from the e-mail server to determine if a size of the e-mail message is above a threshold value, and if not expanding the e-mail content to be above the threshold value; acknowledging to the mobile device the existence of the e-mail message and its respective size; and delivering to the mobile device header content of the e-mail content, thereby only a small fraction of the data corresponding to the e-mail message is actually delivered to the mobile device.

Claims

1. A network component comprising:

an interface to a network for communicating with at least an e-mail server and to at least one mobile device, wherein the network component is in a network path between the at least e-mail server and the at least one mobile device; and

a processing unit for processing a request from the at least one mobile device to the at least e-mail server and causing each e-mail message received by the network component from the at least e-mail server to be viewed by the at least one mobile device as being of a size that is above a threshold value of the at least one mobile device, thereby providing to the at least one mobile device only preview information of each received e-mail message, thereby enabling a user of the at least one mobile device to determine whether to download the each received e-mail message to the at least one mobile device, wherein processing the request comprises determining whether at least an attachment to the each received e-mail message is above the threshold value and if not, expanding the attachment to be of a size that is larger than the threshold value, wherein the threshold value is determined by an e-mail application executed by the at least one mobile device.

2. The network component of claim 1, wherein the processing unit determines whether at least an attachment to the each received e-mail message is above the threshold value and if not, expanding the attachment to be of a size that is larger than the threshold value, wherein the threshold value is determined by an e-mail application executed by the at least one mobile device.

3. The network component of claim 1, wherein the processing unit determines whether at least a text portion of each received e-mail message is above the threshold value and if not, expands the text portion to be of a size that is larger than the threshold value, wherein the threshold value is determined by an e-mail application executed by the at least one mobile device.

4. The network component of claim 3, wherein the expanding the text portion is followed by compression of the expanded text of the each received e-mail message.

5. The network component of claim 4, wherein the compression is at least a GZIP compression.

6. The network component of claim 3, wherein expanding the text portion includes at least one of:

adding line breaks; and

adding space characters.

7. The network component of claim 1, wherein the network component is at least one of:

a proxy server, a virtual private network (VPN) server, a traffic shaper, a router, and a network address translator (NAT).