MAWA: An Efficient and Reliable Web Access Scheme in Mobile Wireless Environments Based on Mobile Agents

Web access in mobile wireless environments suffers more challenge because of mobile device's limited storage, the mobility of mobile device, and the unreliable wireless network environments. It requires some facilities between the wired network and the terminals to help overcome the difficulties of unreliable wireless link, mobility and mobile device capability limitation. Presented in this paper is a new Web access scheme named MAWA, which uses mobile agents to facilitate seamless logging of mobile unit's access activities, thus avoiding unnecessary wireless communication cost. There are three classes of agents in MAWA: Terminal agent, base station agent, and MU agent. Terminal agent runs in the mobile unit, and requests for Web pages from browsers performed by users are transferred to this agent. Base station agent resides on base station with responsibility for creating, storing, sending and receiving an instance of MuAg according to the request from MU or other BsAg. It also maintains the local MuAg queue, and transfers the message or data between MU and its MuAg respectively. MU agent is responsible for a certain MU. This scheme can also help MU handoff among base stations and recover when mobile client suffers a failure. Compared with other schemes by simulation tests, this scheme shows its efficiency and reliability.