Efficient mobile access to the WWW over GSM

An increasing number of users access the W W W from small portable mobile hosts connected through different network interfaces supporting mobility: wireless low bandwidth connections over long distances (GSM 9.6 Kbi t /s ) , wireless medium bandwidth connections over small distances (waveLAN 2 Mbit /s) , desk area infrared connections to stationary LANs (NetBeamIR 4 Mbit/s) . The connections have different distance coverage, bandwidth, latency, cost, and quality of service (error rate, j i t ter) and the parameters may vary over time. GSM provides global untethered connectivity thus allowing ubiquitous mobile access to the WWW: anywhere, anytime. However, it suffers from relatively slow bandwidth and important cost compared to its wired counterpart. Various client devices can use GSM ranging from PDAs to full-featured laptops. In order to use GSM efficiently, we need system and application support for reducing bandwidth requirements, adapting to hardware variations, and optimizing connection costs. In this paper, we propose an application support for W W W access based on a different paradigm than the previous work: we use mobile agents to delegate all t ime-consuming operations to the network, in particular, downloading documents and data type specific distillation of their contents.