Enhanced Services for World-Wide Web in Mobile WAN Environment

Mika Liljeberg, Heikki Helin, Markku Kojo, and Kimmo E. E. Raatikainen: Enhanced Services for World-Wide Web in Mobile WAN Environment. Report C-1996-28, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, April 1996. 12 pages. <http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/TR/C-1996/28>

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Abstract

Currently, the World-Wide Web (WWW) is the best-known and most widely used distributed multimedia application. By utilising the data services of a cellular telephone system, for example the digital GSM system, WWW can be brought to nomadic users. The advantage of using an existing cellular network like the GSM is that it takes care of terminal mobility, including location updates and handovers. The characteristics of cellular telephone links are, however, quite different from those of wireline links. The basic characteristics of any cellular telephone link are narrow bandwidth, highly variable transmission delays, and sudden disconnections. Therefore, such a link creates problems for WWW and other multimedia applications designed to operate with fast and reliable connections. WWW uses the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which in turn is based on TCP. These protocols exhibit a number of performance problems in a wide-area mobile networks. In this paper we describe Mowgli WWW, a WWW middleware implementation that demonstrates several techniques for solving these problems. We report our experiences with Mowgli WWW and give measurement results showing radically improved performance.

Index Terms

Categories and Subject Descriptors:
C.2.1, C.2.2, D.4.8, H4.3, H.5.1, I.7.2

General Terms:

Additional Key Words and Phrases: World-Wide Web, mobility, wireless connections, cellular telephone