Web Agent Supporting Transport Layer Mobility

Typical transmission control protocol (TCP) based web agents in mobile wireless environment have several deficiencies, such as performance degradation, head-of-line blocking, and unsupported mobility. The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport protocol, which provides multi-streaming and multi-homing features. SCTP extensions for dynamic address reconfiguration will support transport layer mobility. We address SCTP based web agents supporting seamless transport layer mobility in the wired and wireless environment. Our proposed SCTP based 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 investigated and described the components 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 web agent reduces the mean response time of a typical TCP based web agent by 12 % on the average.