SCTP Based Framework for Mobile Web Agent

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) based web agents have has several deficiencies, such as performance degradation, head-of-line blocking, and unsupported mobility when applied to the mobile wireless environment. The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport protocol, which provides multistreaming and multi-homing features. Recent SCTP extensions with dynamic address reconfiguration supports transport layer mobility. We propose web agent framework supporting seamless transport layer mobility in the wired and wireless environment. Our proposed framework for mobile web agent is composed of application engine to use the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and protocol engine to deploy SCTP with dynamic address reconfiguration. We have described and evaluated the components of the framework necessary to implement mobile web agents in a ubiquitous environment. Mean response time is an important performance measure of web agents. Simulation results show that our SCTP based framework reduces the mean response time over a typical TCP based scheme by 12%, on the average.