Method and system for light web surfing (17-Nov-2009)

Method and system for light web surfing

Most of the portable devices that are commonly used nowadays like cellular phones, pocket PCs, palms and so on, are theoretically able to connect to the Internet using GPRS. UMTS models can connect to the Internet with higher speed. The subscriptions to this service is qualified as a "pay-as-you-go" service because it is often rated based on usage.

    Customers often go into troubles because GPRS on portable device is slow and most of time, even the most common web sites cannot be accessed, or when they can be accessed the navigation appears to be cumbersome due to the small display. Furthermore, when dealing with "pay-as-you-go" services in general, customers often complain about the high costs and the lack of control on the traffic size each transaction may generate.

    According to customer expectations "pay-as-you-go" services on portable devices would require optimization in the Internet traffic size and a greater control on it, and the Internet connection should ensure a good quality level in particular for the connecting devices where there are limitations in bandwidth and display.

    Moreover usually the provided pages does not take care of device capability so that rendering of page will have specific limitation even if the transferred bytes "contain" an higher quality of images that cannot be rendered because of specific device limitations. Finally the page refreshing is not flexible but either it happens or it does not happen according to the browser and server settings.

    The above issues are addressed by providing an integrated and automatic system to optimize Internet connection on portable devices and provide control over the traffic size and, therefore, cost.

    The proposed solution is based on a logical separation of web pages into a static section that is mainly composed by the web page static look and feel and a dynamic section representing the real content of the page.

    According to such solution the final pages may be downloaded to the portable device into a static part, which is downloaded directly from the web site and is supposed not to change, and a dynamic part, that will reasonably be made of the parameters that, populating the static part, will lead to the final page. In this way the amount of information that need to be exchanged are lower than using the normal navigation approach and consequently there is a faster navigation and a reduced cost associated to the navigation.

    Furthermore, since the subset of required information is smaller than the total available from the entire page, the displaying of such information will turn to be easier to be adjusted to the short dimension of the portable device screen, and the navigation will be enhanced.

    The approach will be profiled to the device type and/or device resolution. In this way when a device is connected to a web page the device capability is transferred in the query of the page so th...