Pervasive and Mobile Computing ( ) – Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pmc Efficient framework for mobile walkthrough application Ghada M. Fathy a,* , Hanan A. Hassan a,1 , Walaa M. Sheta a,1 , Reem Bahgat b,1 a Informatics Research Institute, City for Scientific Research and Technology Application, Alexandria, Egypt b Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo University, Egypt article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Mobile application Progressive mesh Caching technique Walkthrough application abstract The past few years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number and variety of graphics intensive mobile applications, which allow users to interact and navigate through large scenes such as historical sites, museums and virtual cities. These applications support many clients and impose a heavy requirement on network resources and computational resources. One key issue in the design of cost efficient mobile walkthrough applications is the data transmission between servers and mobile client devices. In this paper, we propose an effective progressive mesh transmission framework that stores and divide scene objects into different resolutions. In this approach, each mobile device progressively receives and processes only the object’s details matching its display resolution which improves the overall system’s response time and the user’s perception. A fine grained cache mechanism is used to keep the most frequently requested objects’ details in the device memory and consequently reduce the network traffic. Experiments, in simulated and real world environment, are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework under various settings of the virtual scene and mobile device configuration. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can improve the walkthrough system performance in mobile devices, with a relatively small overhead. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The recent proliferation of mobile phones has created a unique opportunity for researchers to use all their capabilities to provide new applications. Streaming and sharing different kinds of content such as pictures, documents, objects and videos have become more popular than ever. Immersing multiple users in a 3D world, in which each user simply uses a smart phone, has become possible with the evolution of today’s technologies in terms of mobile computing and computer networks. Although we have witnessed these advances, mobile devices still lack the proper resources to run graphic intensive applications, such as walkthrough systems. In general, a walkthrough application is a shared virtual environment where users at their devices interact with each other over a network, each user is symbolized by an entity called avatar. Users normally navigate through the scene, perform various actions and interact with the other users within the same area of interest. The virtual environment must be rendered in real time to display a consistent view for all users. As a result, excessive resources will be required to avoid performance bottlenecks and maintain a reasonable quality of service, typically in terms of response time, latency and rendering speed (number of frames per second). * Corresponding author. Tel.: +20 1099377887; fax: +20 34593415. E-mail addresses: eng.ghadafathy@gmail.com, gh.fathy@mucsat.sci.eg (G.M. Fathy), hananahassan@mucsat.sci.eg (H.A. Hassan), wsheta@mucsat.sci.eg (W.M. Sheta), r.bahgat@fci-cu.edu.eg (R. Bahgat). 1 Fax: +20 34593415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmcj.2014.08.008 1574-1192/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.