An efficient wireless internet access scheme

Abstract

Many popular services provided on wired Internet, such as WWW and FTP, are also used in wireless communication environments. Wireless networks usually have some disadvantages such as lower and variable bandwidth, higher transmission error and connection broken probability, etc. These disadvantages make the wireless Internet access performance inefficient. Furthermore, if a mobile host (MH) move frequently, how to guarantee the reasonable data accessing efficiency is important. This paper proposed a proper architecture and access schemes for wireless Internet accessing, named Smart Follower Cache (SFC). We choose WLAN to be the simulation platform and designate an access point (AP) as a Wireless LAN proxy. The proxy maintains two kinds of cache, one is public cache, and the other is private cache. Every service, like WWW and FTP, has its own corresponding public cache and each MH has its own private cache in the proxy. By caching necessary data in public cache, the proxy can prefetch the necessary data into the public cache and retransmit the data from the public cache immediately while transmission error occurs. Recording the user profile and several personalized data, which were stored in private cache, can make proxy providing different data qualities to different type of MH easily. Moreover, this architecture can accelerate data accessing. When a MH handoff, the original proxy may automatically transmit the MHs relative cache data that are located in the public cache and its private cache to the new proxy. Therefore the MHs can usually access their wanted data from the new proxy more quickly and efficiently. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.