Mowgli WWW software: improved usability of WWW in mobile WAN environments

Abstract

Today the World-Wide Web is the most widely used distributed application. By utilising the data services of cellular telephone systems such as the digital GSM, WWW can be brought to nomadic users. However, the characteristics of cellular telephone links differ greatly from wire-line links. The narrow bandwidth, highly variable transmission delays, and sudden disconnections create problems for many Internet applications. WWW uses the HTTP and TCP/IP protocols, which exhibit a number of usability and performance problems in wide-area mobile networks. Mowgli WWW, a WWW middleware implementation, exploits several new techniques to solve these problems. Although Mowgli WWW was initially designed for a wireless WAN environment, the techniques are also profitable in fixed networks when slow or high-latency communication links are involved.