An active transcoding proxy to support mobile web access

In this paper, we present a proxy based system (MOWSER) to support web browsing from mobile clients over wireless networks. Mowser is a proxy agent between the mobile host and the web server, which performs active transcoding of data on both upstream and downstream traffic to present web information to the mobile user according to the QoS parameters set by the user. Active transcoding is defined as modifying the HTTP stream in situ, and it is entirely transparent to the user. Further, our system does not pose any additional requirements on the mobile user. This is an improvement over other proxy based systems, which only transcode images on the downstream and are mostly not configurable. While developed for mobile users, such a system can actually be useful in any low bandwidth scenario.