Handling client mobility and intermittent connectivity in mobile web accesses

Abstract

Wireless devices are being increasingly used to access data on the web. Since intermittent connectivity and client mobility are inherent in such environments, in this paper, we examine the impact of these factors on coherent dissemination of dynamic web data to wireless devices. We introduce the notion of eventual-delta consistency, and in the context of push and pull-based dissemination propose (i) buffering techniques at the proxy to mask the effects of client disconnections and (ii) application-level handoff algorithms to handle client mobility. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that push is better suited to handle client disconnections due to its lower message overhead and better fidelity, while pull is better suited to handle client mobility due to its lower handoff overheads.