Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10397/83708
Title: Multi-resolution browsing of web documents in distributed agent environment
Authors: Yau, M. T. Stanley
Degree: M.Phil.
Issue Date: 2001
Abstract: A mobile environment is weakly connected, characterized by low communication bandwidth and poor network connectivity. Users retrieving a web document in the mobile environment may have to wait for a long period before actually reading the document, possibly wasting time to obtain documents that they are not interested in. Therefore, we present a multi-resolution transmission and browsing mechanism for web documents. A web document is partitioned into multiple organizational units based on the significance of the information content in the document. A unit with a higher information content, indicating a higher amount of information captured by the unit, will be transmitted earlier. The mobile users will be able to explore the more content-bearing portion of the document earlier and terminate the transmission of an irrelevant document sooner. The higher content-bearing portion of the document should be transmitted successfully with a high probability. This ensures that the mobile users could at least obtain a high level content of the document and determine whether the corrupted portions need to be retransmitted. We present the fault-tolerant multi-resolution transmission mechanism using the Vandermonde-Matrix based Forward Error Correction (VMFEC) coding method. An organizational unit can be divided into M raw packets, and then an encoder transforms the M raw packets to produce N >= M cooked packets. The mobile users can use the decoder to retrieve any combination of M cooked packets for reconstructing the original organizational unit. We employ a mobile agent model to combat the problem of poor network connectivity. The mobile agent can migrate to a base station that virtually establishes a connection to the mobile user. Therefore the mobile user could assume that the connection seldom gets broken and does not need to be concerned with the connectivity any more. Our research efforts are integrated in the Distributed Agent Environment (DAE), which supports the mobile agent in the mobile environment. The DAE provides the mobile agent to perform the mobile user's requests, store the result in the user's profile, and retrieve the result from the profile when connectivity from the mobile user is available. Finally, we design and implement the mobile web browser based on multi-resolution transmission and the mobile agent model and integrate into DAE to demonstrate the look and feel of the multi-resolution web browsing paradigm. We make the performance comparison between the mobile agent models against the conventional client/server models. We have illustrated with a number of experiments that returning results actively by mobile agent is an effective solution.
Subjects: Mobile agents (Computer software)
Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations
Pages: viii, 86 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm
Appears in Collections:Thesis

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