Wireless-adaptation of WWW content over CDMA

Information access through the WWW has become one of the most important applications for mobile clients. However, efficient wireless data connectivity is difficult to achieve due to physical and technological limitations. In this paper, we propose a proxy server architecture that facilitates highly effective latency reduction over the wireless link without modifying any of the existing applications. Based on the capabilities of the client devices, Web browsers, the user preferences, and Web content types, several different levels of wireless-adaptation for Web content are performed. The functions included in the wireless-adaptation are general-purpose lossless data compression, data-type specific lossy compression and re-authoring of HTML documents. We show the improvement in the retrieval time through experiments in which a mobile host accesses the WWW via the proxy architecture over a CDMA cellular network.