On multi-resolution document transmission in mobile web

We propose a multi-resolution transmission mechanism that allows various organizational units of a web document to be transferred and browsed according to the amount of information captured. We define the notion of information content for each individual organizational unit of a web document as an indication of its captured information. The concept of information content is used as a foundation for defining the notion of relative information content which determines the transmission order of various units. Our mechanism allows a web client to explore the more content-bearing portion of a web document earlier so as to be able to terminate browsing a possibly irrelevant document sooner. This scheme is based on our observation that different organizational units of a document contribute to different amount of information to the document. Such a multi-resolution transmission paradigm is particularly useful in mobile web where the wireless bandwidth is a scarce resource and browsing every document in detail would consume the bandwidth unnecessarily. This is becoming more serious when the size of a web document is getting large, such as technical documents. We then present a prototype of the system in Java and CORBA to illustrate its feasibility.