1. Defining Best practices to browse the Internet on Mobile Wireless Phones Aditya Peri Alexander Ribadeneira

2. Introduction Defining Best Practices for browsing the Internet is one of the main concerns for next generation mobile phones. Battery limitations, processing power, memory capacity, bandwidth capacity, content delivery and protocol standardization are still major problems that have not been solved.

3. Protocols The protocols that run on computers to browse the Internet such as hypertext transfer protocol HHTP, Secure Hyper Text Transfer protocol HTTPS and the TCP/IP protocol stack are not suitable for mobile phones due to high inefficiency of the wireless network.

4. Battery Limitations Browsing the Internet on a mobile phone is a power consumption process and battery limitations will not allow users to browse the Internet for an extended number of consecutive hours. Processor speed aggregates to this problem since higher speed processors generally tend to consume more power.

5. Limited Memory Capacity Mobile phones have limited memory capacity, in contrast to a computer on which the memory capacity is not a major concern. Mobile phones have a small memory page-size that prevents users to access sites that weight in the order of hundred of kilobytes. As a matter of fact, inaccessibility seems to be predominant for most web sites due to the limited memory capacity of mobile devices. A certain type of Motorola mobile phone can only load sites that weight less than 15 kilobytes, while Yahoo and Amazon home pages weight more than one hundred kilobytes.

6. Low bandwidth Communication channels in wireless networks have less bandwidth than wired networks channels. Moreover, retransmission of data happens frequently on wireless networks due to path fading effect and well- known issues of low reception. For example, GSM technology that is a standard in the United States can transmit data at low rates of 9.6 and 14.4 kbits/s.

7. Web Development Most web developers concentrate on creating sites that exploit the presentation rather than underlying a logic layer. It is known that the content that is delivered to a mobile phone is not the same than the one that is delivered to a desktop computer because of screen size limitations. To define what portion of the web content is relevant to be display on the screen of a mobile phone is still a major issue. In addition, delivering this content to a mobile phone represents another major problem because not all mobile devices have the same screen size.

8. Partial solution for content delivery Currently there is software that is capable of detecting mobile phones page-size capacity, and depending on the size, it divides the content of a website into multiple parts that will be delivered to the user into manageable pieces, this technique is known as manually content replication. For example the software Skweezer is capable to detect Motorola V551 series phones page-size limitations, and when requesting the ebay web site, it compress the three hundred kilobytes of data into approximately fifty kilobytes, consequently five parts of ten kilobytes will be delivered to the user. However, this is not the best way to solve this problem.

9. Third generation Wireless technologies 3G The third generation in Wireless technologies 3G will support data rates in the hundred of kbps, with a future enhancement of up to 2 Mbps. As a matter of fact, New Advances in technology over the GSM standard resulted in the creation of the GPRS standard that can support the IP protocol over wireless GSM infrastructure. It is known that GPRS can support data rates up to 172 kbits/s.

10. Solution from web developers Web developers are just starting to migrate all their sites from HTML to XML, this will have a superior impact on the way that web content is delivered with a logic structure. Developers are beginning to incorporate relational markup language RML on their sites. RML relates on how to create relational hierarchies to deliver content, this follows to a technique that is known as write one time, deliver anywhere. With this technique web developers will simply have to create one version of their website that in consequence will be delivered successfully to both desktop computers and mobile phones.

11. Solution from web developers

12. WAP Protocol The wireless application protocol WAP was created in 1997 by the Wapforum. One of the main ideas of the forum was to develop wireless standard protocols for mobile devices. As a result, the wireless markup language WML and the WAP protocol stack were developed.

13. WAP Protocol These new protocols incorporate better in the world of mobile wireless devices than the HTTP protocol and TCP/IP protocol stack due to their lighted design. WML is a subset of the extensible markup language XML that provides better efficiency to deliver content.

14. WAP Protocol For example in the case that HTTP sends its payload in plain text format, WAP will compress the binary data to be send over the mobile wireless network for better efficiency. The mobile phone works in conjunction with a WAP gateway. A mobile device makes a request using WAP protocol to a WAP gateway, the WAP gateway converts the request to the TCP/IP protocol stack and forwards the request to a Web Server, the Web Server replies back to the WAP gateway which in turn replies back to the mobile phone using the WAP protocol.

15. Defining best practices for mobile web browsing There is an interest in companies to define best practices behind this technology. As a matter of fact major players in the market such as Nokia, Cingular and Verizon Wireless, and major search engine companies such as Yahoo and Google have demonstrated interest to share their experience on this matter over the last few years. Providing Internet to mobile phones in an optimal manner requires innovative solutions that will reduce cost and enhance efficiency.

16. Evaluation Providing energy to mobiles phones for extended periods of time will always be a major concern. The high advances in microprocessors technology could alleviate the problem of high processor power consumption in the future, this aspect is important because mobile devices will require more processing speed to provide security to web critical transactions. Web developers should drive more efforts to develop sites in XML, this technology will allow them to successfully deliver web content to both desktop and mobile devices.

17. Conclusion Despite the fact that standard protocols are not define to accomplish this task, some companies already started to deploy the service to their customers, consequently the service is slow and the content that is delivered is not the same for all type of mobile phones. New Standards and not just separated efforts need to be develop to allow browsing the internet on mobile phones as simple as browse the internet on a computer. The first annual convention on mobile telephony will be place in Toronto Canada, Thus improving company intercommunication to share their experience over the last years on this matter. In the next 5 years it is expected that almost every mobile phone in the Unite states will browse the Internet and certainly this technology will boost the wireless market.

18. References 1. Skweezer launches paging feature for browsing the Internet on mobile phones posted 14-MAR-2005 22:44 2. Challenges in Mobile Electronic Commerce,Aphrodite Tsalgatidou, Jari Veijalainen, Evaggelia Pitoura, University of Jyvaskyla, University of Ioannina. 2000. 3. Bringing the Wireless Internet to Mobile Devices, Subhasis Saha, Mark Jamtgaard, John Villasenor, University of California, 2001. 4. Navigating in a Mobile XHTML Application, Anne Kaikkonen, Virpi Roto, Nokia Research Center, 2003. 5. Browsing the Mobile Internet, George Lawton, 2001. 6. Mobile Industry Leaders Agree on Best Practices for Mobile Web Content; W3C Invites Review of Guidelines for Improved Mobile Browsing, 2006. http://www.w3.org/2006/01/mbp-pressrelease