Class-based Proxy Server for Mobile Computers

To support the mobility, mobile computers are generally equipped with lower capability than desktop PCs or workstations in terms of the size of a display, the processing power of CPU and so on. This may give a rise to limitation in mobile computers of supporting multimedia services such as World Wide Web which users would otherwise fully enjoy in desktop PCs. Approaches to reducing the limitations are distillating original multimedia data or converting them to text. Conventional proxy servers for mobile computer simply send distillated image files with the fixed size regardless of the display size of a target mobile computer. Since the cached data is kept separately for each user, they cannot be shared among users with the same display configuration and thus the proxy server could be overloaded. In this paper, we first classify various mobile computers based on their display capability in terms of display sizes and colors. We propose an enhanced proxy server called Class-based proxy that provides a mobile computer with distillated image files in proportion to its class display capacity. The proposed proxy server allows a mobile computer user to have a homepage view similar to that in PC or Workstation. Mobile computers with the same class share the cached image files, which are distillated appropriately for that class. This helps the proxy server to get higher cache hit ratio with improved efficiency and scalability.