TR-IIS-08-008    Fulltext

Abstract

With wireless technologies extending to every part of our daily lives, mobile networking applications are becoming increasingly popular for accessing the Internet. Among them, web surfing is one of the most important applications because the World Wide Web, unencumbered by geographic boundaries, has accelerated the dissemination of information and knowledge via the Internet. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer mobile web surfing scheme called Collaborative Internet Access (CIA). Unlike traditional approaches, the proposed scheme implements a Collaborative Forwarding algorithm that takes advantage of opportunistic wireless connections to improve network capacity by exploiting the diversity of network mobility. Moreover, we propose a Scalable CIA scheme, called SCIA, which integrates the Layered Multiple Description Coding (LMDC) algorithm with the CIA scheme. SCIA allows the end user to preview the web content, even before the data has been completely transferred. Using simulations as well as real-world network scenarios, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides a better web surfing service than traditional schemes, and thus facilitates more effective web surfing on the go.

Index terms: Internet Access, Peer-to-peer Networks, Opportunistic Networks, Scalable Coding.