PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF PROXY BASED ARCHITECTURE FOR WIRELESS/MOBILE WEB BROWSING

Abstract

WWW is currently considered as the most promising and rapidly evolving software platform for the deployment of applications in wide area networks. Another technology, which proliferates rapidly in such environment is wireless communication network. The merging of these technologies i.e., mobile computing and WWW is considered of major importance to the computing industry for the forthcoming years due to the progress in the wireless communications area. Need to accelerate web browsing is not a new one and in case of mobile computing where mobile host is facilitated with limited energy source this need is much more. A proxy-based architecture for accelerating web browsing on cellular customer premises network exists which maintains proxy cache for the mobile computer at base station [11]. This proxy cache is meant for reducing the wait period experienced by the mobile user when fetching remote document. In this architecture the proxy cache maintained at the base station is relocated prior to the actual movement of the mobile user. Full proxy cache is relocated to most probable neighbor and partial proxy caches are relocated to less probable neighbors. This relocation is done according to the path prediction algorithms based on learning automata. This thesis aims at performance evaluation of this proxy cache relocation architecture and performance comparison of an existing path prediction algorithm with its modified version. The modified path prediction algorithm is shown to perform better than the previously existing algorithm. A generalized simulation model was developed in Standard C++ and the simulation results thus obtained for the performances of path prediction algorithms are presented and compared. The implementation of simulation model is also discussed so as to give an idea of how to implement further im