An Effective Pre-refresh Mechanism for Embedded Web Browser of Mobile Handheld Devices

Lately mobile handheld devices such as Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and cellular phones are getting more popular for personal web surfing. However, today most mobile handheld devices have relatively poor web browsing capability due to their low performance so their users have to suffer longer communication latency than those of desktop Personal Computers (PCs). In this paper, we propose an effective pre-refresh mechanism for embedded web browser of mobile handheld devices to reduce this problem. The proposed mechanism uses the idle time to pre-refresh the expired web objects in an embedded web browser's cache memory. It increases the utilization of Central Processing Unit (CPU) power and network bandwidth during the idle time and consequently reduces the client's latency and web browsing cost. An experiment was done using a simulator designed by us to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed mechanism. The experiment result demonstrates that it has a good performance to make web surfing faster.