| One challenge in the development of wireless Internet access is the seamless integration of wireless devices into the global Internet. Since the Internet makes predominant use of the Internet communication protocol stack (e.g. TCP/IP, UDP/IP), in order to achieve seamless wireless Internet access these protocols should be used extensively in the wireless environment. Unfortunately, most wireless terminals in the real world, especially resource-constrained wireless terminals (e.g. Mobile phone, PDA, Two-Way Pager, etc.), are unable to comprehend any existent Internet communication protocol. Due to the lack of universal APIs and protocol standards, how to integrate these wireless terminals into the global Internet is a major challenge. In this thesis we advocate a Virtual Socket Architecture (VSA) which is a client-gateway-server oriented approach for wireless Internet access in a Wireless WAN environment. This approach uses a gateway to separate the management of the behaviorally different wired and wireless worlds and to provide the wireless terminal with an access point to the Internet. It also allows the use of a lightweight protocol stack with a set of virtual socket interfaces on the wireless terminal, and keeps the entire Internet communication infrastructure within the gateway. A specially designed protocol is applied to the wireless link to manage the bi-directional transmission of the socket operation requests and results. Based on this idea this approach could eventually achieve the goals of making resource-constrained wireless terminals access the Internet and also seamlessly integrating wireless terminals into the Internet without changing the existent Internet communication protocol stack implementations and applications in the wired networks. |
