On Mobile Systems and Disconnected Browsing of Distributed Information
Anupam Joshi, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Elias N. Houstis · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 1996
The soflware and protocols associated with the World Wide Web are designed with static hosts in mind.Static hosts are connected to wired, high bandwidth networks, and are capable of transmitting and receiving large amounts of data without significant delays.Therefore the size of the incoming data files has never been a concern.However, this causes problems when information access is desired on mobile hosts (MH), since data transmission over a wireless network is much slower than on a wired network.Mobile computers are also relatively rcsourcepoor, compared to their desktop counterparts.This fad is ignored by HTTP servers, and large data files are transmitted to computers that cannot properly display them.Also, mobile computers operate in constantly changing network environments.H 1s possible for a mobile computer to become temporarlly disconnected from a network when it changes base stations or goes out of range of a base station.A mobile host may also doze off to preserve battery power and thus be disconnected.If at the time it goes down, a mobile computer is communicating with another computer (mobile or static), it should be able to tolerate the fault of temporary disconnection.This work focuses on addressing these problems in the context of web browsing from a mobile host..The current model of Web browsing is inherently sequential, and wasteful of bandwidth.This paper investigates an efficient model for browsing and describes the design of a smart Web browsing application which performs transactions based on the user's available resources and manages disconnection.