Composable proxy services to support collaboration on the mobile Internet

This paper describes the design and operation of a composable proxy infrastructure that enables mobile Internet users to collaborate via heterogeneous devices and network connections. The approach is based on detachable Java I/O streams, which enable proxy filters and transcoders to be dynamically inserted, removed, and reordered on a given data stream. Unlike conventional Java I/O streams, detachable streams can be stopped, disconnected, reconnected, and restarted. As such, they provide a convenient method by which to support the dynamic composition of proxy services. Moreover, use of the I/O stream abstraction enables network distribution and stream adaptability to be implemented transparently with respect to application components. The operation and implementation of detachable streams are described. To evaluate the composable proxy infrastructure, it is used to enhance interactive audio communication among users of a Web-based collaborative computing framework. Two forward error correction (FEC) proxylets are developed, one using block erasure codes and the other using the GSM 06.10 encoding algorithm. Separately, each type of FEC improves the ability of the audio stream to tolerate errors in a wireless LAN environment. When composed in a single proxy, however, they cooperate to correct additional types of burst errors. Results are presented from a performance study conducted on a mobile computing testbed.