Supporting the WWW in Wireless Communications Through Mobile Agents

Mobile computing is considered of major importance to the computing industry for the forthcoming years due to the progress in wireless mobile communications. We present a proxy-based architecture that manages to accelerate Web browsing in wireless Customer Premises Networks (CPN). We discuss how such an architecture is implemented using the IBM Aglets framework for mobile agents. The suggested architecture relies heavily on proxy caches – maintained in base stations – which are relocated to follow a roaming user in other control areas (clusters of cells). The cache management scheme involves relocation of full caches to the most-likely-to-be visited control areas, but also fractions of the cache to less-likely-to-be-visited neighbours. A movement prediction algorithm, based on a learning automaton, is used to determine the future location of the terminal. The discussed architecture components have been implemented as Aglets to allow for the efficient introduction of the service in a CPN infrastructure.