Design and Performance Studies of an Adaptive Scheme for Serving Dynamic Web Content in a Mobile Computing Environment

Abstract

Currently, people gain easy access to an increasingly diverse range of mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, and handheld computers. As dynamic content has become dominant on the fast-growing World Wide Web (C. Yuan et al., 2003), it is necessary to provide effective ways for the users to access such prevalent Web content in a mobile computing environment. During a course of browsing dynamic content on mobile devices, the requested content is first dynamically generated by remote Web server, then transmitted over a wireless network, and, finally, adapted for display' on small screens. This leads to considerable latency and processing load on mobile devices. By integrating a novel Web content adaptation algorithm and an enhanced caching strategy, we propose an adaptive scheme called MobiDNA for serving dynamic content in a mobile computing environment. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MobiDNA system, we construct an experimental testbed to investigate its performance. Experimental results demonstrate that this scheme can effectively improve mobile dynamic content browsing, by improving Web content readability on small displays, decreasing mobile browsing latency, and reducing wireless bandwidth consumption