Novel web agent framework to support seamless mobility for data networks

In this study, the authors address a mobile Web agent framework based on stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) to overcome the deficiencies, which the typical mobile Web agent framework based on transmission control protocol (TCP) suffers from, such as performance degradation, head-of-line blocking and unsupported mobility in mobile wireless environment. The proposed SCTP-based mobile Web agent framework supports seamless transport layer mobility in a ubiquitous environment. It consists of an application engine and a transport engine, to use the hypertext transfer protocol and to deploy SCTP with dynamic address reconfiguration, respectively. The authors explore and describe the components necessary to implement the proposed mobile Web agent framework in an ubiquitous environment. The performance of the proposed SCTP-based mobile Web agent is compared with that of a typical TCP-based mobile Web agent using ns-2 simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed Web agent based on SCTP has a remarkably lower mean response time than a typical Web agent based on TCP.