Stateful session handoff for mobile WWW

Abstract

This paper proposes a web session handoff system that can hand over not only stateless but also stateful sessions between homogenous and heterogeneous user devices to enable uninterrupted and seamless web access. The proposed system adopts a proxy-based approach and an optional client-assisted scheme in order to track and hand over session information. In the proposed system, a session is registered at a User Agent Proxy (UAP) and then tracked by the UAP so that the session can be handed over from one device via the UAP to another device. In addition to session information tracked by a UAP, the UAP can hand over more comprehensive session information by using the client-assisted scheme. Compared with client-based approaches, our design has several advantages, such as less modification to user devices, practicability, and fault tolerance. We have implemented a UAP on a PC and client programs for both PC and PDA. The implementation can successfully hand over between PC and PDA a stateful session for online shopping applications. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.