A distributed proxy server system for wireless mobile Web service

The transcoding proxy strategy has been widely used as a means to reduce the delay in retrieving Web pages over wireless mobile data networks. However, this strategy has a serious drawback of being a potential point of failure or a bottleneck of the service. We developed a distributed proxy server system in which multiple proxy servers are installed at geographically dispersed locations and share the workloads among themselves by serving mobile hosts within assigned regions. A new handoff (HO) message protocol is proposed to enable handoffs between proxies as the mobile hosts move between regions. With this proxy server handoff protocol a client agent at the mobile host requests a proxy server to initiate handoff processing and two proxy servers synchronize distilled data for a HTTP session disconnected by the handoff.