On supporting weakly-connected browsing in a mobile web environment

A mobile environment is weakly-connected, characterized by low communication bandwidth and poor connectivity. Conventional paradigm for surfing mobile web documents is ineffective since portions of a document could be corrupted during transmission and it is expensive to retransmit the whole document. It is important that the high content-bearing portions should be transmitted successfully so that a mobile client could at least obtain a high level content and determine if the corrupted portions need to be retransmitted. We have proposed a multi-resolution transmission paradigm which allows higher content-bearing portions of a web document to be transmitted, by partitioning it into multiple organizational units and associating an information content with each unit. The client can explore the higher content-bearing portion earlier and terminate browsing an irrelevant document sooner. In this paper, we extend our previous work and propose a fault-tolerant multi-resolution transmission scheme which allows units of higher information content to be recovered from transmission error. The client can obtain an overall content of a web document and either terminate the transmission of the remaining portions or decide if the corrupted portions need to be retransmitted. We demonstrate its feasibility with a prototype and with simulation results.