| Internet access by mobile users, who roam on a mobile network with exotic electronic devices, presents a scenario of browsing that is substantially different from the wired network. When users, with current Web technology, change devices or the point of attachment to the network, a different Internet appears, for example, personal profiles like bookmarks and shopping carts for ecommerce sites are lost. Furthermore, the response time is longer, the heterogeneity of mobile devices is conflict with the wide variety of Web contents, and the user intent is not automated.;In this dissertation, we explore two ways to deal with above challenges. First, the current Web caching mechanism is applied to wireless networks. We designed a mobile Web caching protocol---the Extended Internet Caching Protocol (x-ICP). It is deployed at the edge of the Internet to deliver Web contents from a nearby Home Proxy server if there is no performance degradation compared to fetch them from the origin sites. The x-ICP is also responsible for giving users a consistent look on their personalized Web pages. Second, we applied several content services to the cached objects. Three adaptive mechanisms are designed to cope with device heterogeneity and Web content variety. We first created the adaptive Web contents, where the Partiality and Fidelity Markup Language (PFML) is used to embed metadata into Web pages. Based on this information, the Partiality Adaptation and Versioning Negotiation (PAVN) approaches are used to adapt cached Web contents to different devices in the first place. We also designed client and server side adaptive algorithm to let users express their intents automatically and invisibly. |
