Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

A Context-Aware HTML/XML Document Transmission Process for Mobile Wireless Clients

  • Published:
World Wide Web Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Delivery and rendering of HTML/XML documents has been a core task in many contemporary networking applications. In mobile wireless networks, efficient handling of these types of documents is necessary due to the frequent disconnections, packet loss, and high bit error rate. One approach to address the challenge is the ability to process and reuse the partial data. Current application protocols like HTTP cannot support this approach due to the following constraints: TCP's in-order data uploading to the applications and tag matching. We propose a context-aware transmission process (CATP) to run on top of UDP. This protocol does not transmit HTML/XML files in-order. Instead, it reorganizes the files and transmit tags first before transporting their enclosed data. Conforming browsers receive the file structures and fill in with subsequent data packets in whatever sequence they arrive. As a result, lost and delayed packets do not hinder rendering of those that are logically behind but have already arrived at the client sides. Thus the retransmission of the lost frames can be concealed and overall user perceived performance improved. The user-perceivable performance is quantified in terms of silent time during which no activity is observed at the browser display. The protocol also facilitates partial content caching, amortizing network transmission overhead, and non-interactive applications of Web services. We validated this protocol through prototype implementation and compared the performance with TCP and in-order delivery UDP schemes. Our protocol provides better user-perceivable performance under various loss rates and document sizes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. A. Adya, P. Bahl, and L. Qiu, “Analyzing Browse patterns of mobile clients,” in Proceedings of SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop, San Francisco, CA, USA, November 2001.

  2. J. Bennett and C. Partridge, “Packet reordering is not pathological network behavior,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 7(6), 1999.

  3. N. Bhatti, A. Bouch, and A. Kuchinsky, “Integrating user-perceived quality into web server design,” in Proceedings of the 9th International World Wide Web Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 2000.

  4. K. Brown and S. Singh, “M-UDP: UDP for mobile cellular networks,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 26(5), October 1996.

  5. K. Brown and S. Singh, “M-TCP: TCP for mobile cellular networks,” in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 27 (5) October 1997.

  6. G. Buyukkokten, O. Kaljuvee, H. Garcia-Molina, A. Paepcke, and T. Winograd, “Efficient web browsing on handheld devices using page and form summerization,” ACM Transaction on Information Systems 20 (1), 2002.

  7. J. W. Byers, M. Luby, M. Mitzenmacher, and A. Rege, “A digital fountain approach to reliable distribution of bulk data,” ACM SIGCOMM 1998.

  8. J. Challenger, A. Iyengar, and P. Danzig, “A scalable system for consistently caching dynamic web data,” IEEE INFOCOM, 1999.

  9. J. Challenger, A. Iyengar, K. Witting, C. Ferstat, and P. Reed, “A publishing system for efficiently creating dynamic web content,” IEEE INFOCOM, 2000.

  10. H. Chen and P. Mohapatra, “A novel navigation and transmission technique for mobile handheld devices,” Technical Report CSE-2003-1, Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis. Available at http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/research/tech-reports/2003/CSE-2003-1.pdf

  11. I. Cidon, R. Rom, A. Gupta, and C. Schuba, “Hybrid TCP-UDP transport for Web traffic,” IEEE IPCCC 1999.

  12. F. Douglis, A. Haro, and M. Rabinovich, “HPP: HTML macro-preprocessing to support dynamic document caching,” in USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, 1997.

  13. ESI—Edge Server Include, http://www.esi.org

  14. Extreme HTML Optimization, http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/html/optimize/

  15. J. Heidemann, “Performance interactions between P-HTTP and TCP implementations,” ACM Computer Communication Review 27(2), 1997, 65–73.

    Google Scholar 

  16. J. Heidemann, K. Obraczka, and J. Touch, “Modeling the performance of HTTP over several transport protocols,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 5(5), 1997, 616–630.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. ICONOCAST newsletter for August 17, 2000, http://www.iconocast.com/issue/20000817.html

  18. IETF, “RFC 2960: Stream control transmission protocol,” http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2960.txt

  19. MAWI Working Group Traffic Archive, http://tracer.csl.sony.co.jp/mawi/

  20. J. Mogul, “Support for out-of-order responses in HTTP.” http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mogul-http-ooo-00.txt

  21. P. Mohapatra and H. Chen, “WebGraph: A framework for managing and improving performance of dynamic web content,” Special Issue of Proxy Servers in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, 2002.

  22. B. A. Myers, “The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces,” Proc. ACM CHI'85 Conf. (San Francisco, CA, 14–18 April), 11–17.

  23. J. Nielsen, Usability Engineering, Chapter 5, Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.

  24. J. Nielsen, Designing Web Usability, New Riders Publishing, December 16, 1999.

  25. NIST NET, http://snad.ncsl.nist.gov/itg/nistnet/

  26. V. N. Padmanabhan, “Addressing the challenges of Web data transport,” PhD thesis, Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, 1998.

  27. V. Padmanabhan and R. Katz, “TCP Fast Start: A technique for speeding up web transfers,” IEEE Globecom‘98 Internet MiniConference, November 1998.

  28. PC Magazine, “Download tables faster,” May 7, 2002.

  29. H. Rao, Y. Chen, D. Chang, and M. Chen, “iMobile: A proxy-based platform for mobile services,” in The First ACM Workshop on Wireless Mobile Internet (WMI), 2001.

  30. M. Rabinovich, Z. Xiao, F. Douglis, and C. Kalmanek, “Moving edge-side includes to the real edge — the clients,” USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, 2003.

  31. M. Rabinovich and H. Wang, “DHTTP: An efficient and cache-friendly transfer protocol for Web traffic,” IEEE INFOCOM, 2001.

  32. Resource Description Framework (RDF), http://www.w3.org/RDF/

  33. L. Rizzo, “Dummynet and forward error correction,” in Proceedings of Freenix, June 1998.

  34. P. Rodriguez, A. Kirpal, and E. W. Biersack, “Parallel-access for mirror sites in the internet,” IEEE INFOCOM, 2000.

  35. SAX: The Simple API for XML, http://www.megginson.com/SAX/

  36. B. N. Schilit et al., “m-Links: An infrastructure for very small internet devices,” in Proc. of the 7th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Rome, Italy, Jul 2001.

  37. W. R. Stevens, Unix Network Programming–Networking APIs: Socket and XTI, Prentice Hall, 1998.

  38. G. Wallace, “The JPEG still picture compression standard,” Communications of the ACM 34(4):1991, 30–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. WAP Forum, “Wireless markup language,” available at http://www.wapforum.org

  40. Wget, http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html

  41. WWW Consortium, http://www.w3c.org

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Engineering II, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Huamin Chen & Prasant Mohapatra

Authors
  1. Huamin Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Prasant Mohapatra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Huamin Chen.

Additional information

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through the grants CCR-0296070 and ANI-0296034. A preliminary version appeared in the ICDCS Workshops, 2003.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Chen, H., Mohapatra, P. A Context-Aware HTML/XML Document Transmission Process for Mobile Wireless Clients. World Wide Web 8, 439–461 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-005-1314-x

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-005-1314-x

Keywords