JANUARY  1998

Start-up ProxiNet paves the way to smart, small, fast NCs A new contender pulls together existing technology to solve bandwidth limits and address visual representation of content on small devices By Cynthia Kurkowski

here's a new network computer developer in town. The company is called ProxiNet, and it launched this month in Berkeley, California. ProxiNet's business is to leverage Web accelerator and content delivery technologies developed by a UC-Berkeley research team. The company plans to do this with a two-pronged strategy. First, ProxiNet is extending the capabilities of UC-Berkeley's TranSend Web accelerator. This accelerator product claims to reduce Web bottlenecks by a factor of three to seven. Mail this article to a friend Second, ProxiNet is also going to publish the Top Gun Wingman full graphical Web browser for the USRobotics Palm Pilot PDA. Using these technologies, ProxiNet's new-business strategy will focus on improving Internet access and personalized information delivery to thin clients, including handheld devices, in corporate and consumer markets. ProxiNet's definition of thin clients includes everything "smaller or more constrained than a desktop PC or laptop, including NCs." ProxiNet hopes to leverage this strategy to capture a significant portion of the non-PC, thin-client market. This market is estimated to reach an annual sales volume of 6.7 million units by the year 2001 (by the International Data Corporation). IDC forecasts strong growth for Internet access by these devices which include: NCs screen-phones smart handheld devices (smart cellular phones and satellite phones, PDAs, and Windows CE devices) NetTVs Internet connected game consoles IDC expects annual shipments to total more than 5 million units in 1998, and more than 43 million units in 2001. If this shipment forecast proves close to the mark, the installed base of these thin-client devices will be more than 84 million by 2001. The whys and how "We believe that providing a full-featured Web/e-mail solution for the various NC platforms is essential if the NC is to replace not only terminals, but PCs on the desktop," says ProxiNet's CEO Martin Ross. "ProxiNet can bring the Web to the NC and other thin clients without bulking up the thin client to the point at which it becomes fat and loses its competitive advantage in relation to the PC." ProxiNet plans to accomplish this task is by offloading a substantial amount of the computation onto a proxy server that can perform on-the-fly reformatting of Web content and run other applications on behalf of a thin-client user. Ross explains that ProxiNet's technology is a good fit for NCs since it is able to offload whatever level of functionality is not supported by a given device onto a ProxiNet proxy server. By running applications on a ProxiNet proxy server, Ross says IT managers can turn this disadvantage into a benefit since network administrators can perform upgrades and install plug-ins centrally rather than having to upgrade each user's device. In his paper, "Adapting to Network and Client Variation Via On-Demand Dynamic Distillation," lead TranSend researcher and ProxiNet's Chief Technology Officer Armando Fox states, "One way to push the complexity away from both clients and servers is by relocating it into the network infrastructure. Services such as distillation and refinement [of information] can then be provided by a proxy, a source of bountiful cycles that is well connected to the rest of the Internet." The proxy could be, for example, an Internet Service Provider connection point (such as is the case of UC Berkeley's TranSend Web acceleration service). Such an arrangement, he states, confers technical as well as economic advantages, including: Servers concentrate on serving high quality content, rather than having to maintain multiple versions. Servers do not pay the costs required to do on-demand distillation. Legacy servers remain unchanged. Simple and inexpensive clients can rely on the proxy to optimize content from servers designed for higher-end clients. Rather than communicating with many servers per session, the client communicates with a single logical entity, the proxy. This allows fine control over both endpoints of the slow network connecting the client to the proxy. In effect, it allows the client to manage bandwidth at the application level, just as databases manage memory at the application level. Distillation and refinement can be offered as a value-added service by a service provider. The result is an economic object has already been committed. How TranSend speeds up Web access and loading times The engine driving ProxiNet's products is TranSend, a Web accelerator proxy technology which reportedly reduces the Web bottleneck by a factor of three to seven. TranSend speeds up Web access and loading times by reducing the size of images and video on the Web page. TranSend transforms data to a more reasonable form by throwing away image resolution or color information and by transcoding data (images and text) into formats the client device can best understand. The process is instantaneous: A single transformation, or distillation, is reported to take less than a second. In one UC-Berkeley test, a 39.3KB GIF image is used to illustrate TranSend's efficiency. Over a 28.8 modem, the image would normally take at least 11 seconds to download. Over a 14.4 modem, it would take 22 seconds or more. The TranSend proxy takes about 30 milliseconds to transform the image. The default transformation (which converts the GIF into a JPEG, throws away half the resolution, and turns the "quality" knob of the JPEG down to 75 percent), results in a slightly poorer quality image that is only 3.9KB in size. But this poorer quality image translates into a one-second download time over a 28.8 modem (two seconds over a 14.4) for a speed improvement factor of 10. This method could be the technological breakthrough the portable, laptop, and small-device NC manufacturers have been waiting for to successfully compete against PC laptop manufacturers. Of course, there is some image degradation. However, the quality of the image all depends on how much it's transformed, or "distilled." Users have the option of refining the distillation process through a preferences setting -- images can be viewed in their original, undegraded form. How TranSend works On the surface, TranSend functions like Intel's QuickWeb in that it accelerates Web performance. But unlike QuickWeb, TranSend was specifically designed to operate across clusters of PCs to address the scaling needs of large user environments such as ISPs and corporate Intranets. The other difference is QuickWeb only operates at the desktop level. TranSend goes beyond the desktop to cater to the rapidly growing portable-device user community. The TranSend proxy is browser-independent and runs inside the network. TranSend sits up there right next to the bank of modems between the browser and the server, and acts as a intermediary. To the server, TranSend looks just like any other client. TranSend intercepts the client request and then interacts with the Web server on the client's behalf. TranSend is built on three parameter-based distillers: Scaling and low-pass filtering of JPEG images using the off-the-shelf jpeg-6a library. GIF-to-JPEG conversion followed by JPEG degradation. A Perl HTML "munger" that marks up inline image references with distillation preferences and adds extra links next to distilled images so that users can retrieve the original content In the UC-Berkeley service, TranSend is deployed across a cluster of PCs, and, thus, allows a large number of distillation requests to be processed simultaneously. UC-Berkeley's test bed for TranSend is supporting 250,000 plus requests with as few as 10 PCs. To expand the TranSend service, all one has to do is add more PCs. In this way, TranSend scales very easily. TranSend reportedly does not interfere with Web server administration tasks and manages itself by spreading the distillation tasks evenly across the PCs. Fox says it works with existing servers and components; you do not have to modify the Web servers in any way, shape, or form. TranSending the desktop market with portable NC support Web browsing on today's popular portable computing devices is proving to be a formidable challenge to manufacturers, Internet software developers, and Web content providers alike. As a general rule, Web content is designed and formatted for viewing on desktop computers, and therefore, renders poorly on smaller handheld devices, such as PDAs. The limitations imposed by the portable devices' small screens and specialized computing capabilities ultimately leave these users with little or no choice but to browse in text-only mode. These thin clients require effective and efficient access to the Internet before they can be successfully marketed as "Internet appliances." "Under the current Internet paradigm, small form-factor devices are treated as the second class citizens of the Internet," says Ross. "ProxiNet's intelligent proxy technology makes small devices first class citizens by re-formatting and optimizing content on the fly for small form-factor devices without requiring any change to Web content or to Web servers in general." Ross says the company plans to raise the status of lower level thin clients (PDAs, smart phones) to match the Internet-access capabilities of desktop and laptop computers through TranSend's portable device sister technology, Top Gun Wingman, a high-performance graphical browser for USR's PalmPilot. Gunning for clear pix on small screens When accessing the Internet from small devices, most Web pages and images are too large to fit on a screen, and may even contain content that the device cannot render (such as progressive JPEG data). Top Gun Wingman is capable of reformatting full-size Web content into a size that fits into the screen of a PDA and can still be viewed and read. The ProxiNet portable browser relies on HTML so Web content providers are not forced to adopt a special non-standard language (such as HDML) just to cater to the PDA crowd. TranSend outputs to thin browser clients a simplified page markup and scaled-down images that match the client's screen dimensions and font metrics. No HTML parsing, layout, or image processing is necessary. Parsing, layout, and image conversion are performed at a proxy server running on a workstation cluster; only a simple representation of the output is spoon fed to the browser client. According to Fox, the total amount of code is about 30KB, well below the 64KB limit of a PalmPilot application. The smaller and more efficient data representation reduces transmission time to the client. Personalized information delivery of legacy and Web content "We believe that there is a role for personalization of information on the Internet, but it must be done in a way that is transparent both to users and to Web site administrators," says Ross. In addition to its other services, ProxiNet's proxy server technology will also allow Web content providers and ISPs to develop and deploy services that allow users (or companies) to collect, modify, or create Web content and deliver it to users in the form of a personalized information delivery service. ProxiNet's proxy server can assemble content that is relevant to a given user. For example, someone who lives in Boston can have the proxy server poll a dozen Web sites that cover cultural events in Boston and assemble a list of events taking place during the last two weeks of January. A more general business example is having the proxy server go out and visit the Web sites of a company's competitors and its customers, and have the results delivered to all of its employees through the Web or by e-mail. In a similar fashion, ProxiNet's "intelligent agent" capabilities can conceivably be used to access legacy and mainframe data -- perhaps even to gather data from different legacy systems in different locations. Because the ProxiNet approach is proxy-based, any user who is linked to the ProxiNet proxy server can transparently access legacy databases and applications. According to Ross, no additional modifications to a network are necessary since the proxy server sits between clients and servers and intercepts data on the fly. A client-side agent acts as a "protocol filter," communicating with the remote proxy on behalf of the application. Problems TranSend must overcome before going commercial Like every new application, the TranSend team still has a few bugs to work out -- some of which are paramount to its success in the commercial world. The least of which is that transparent GIFs are no longer transparent after distillation. Another major problem is that TranSend does not work seamlessly with JavaScript. While JavaScript is insecure (as the TranSend team is eager to remind users), the world is still using the technology. And it doesn't look like JavaScript will be going away any time soon, so a bug fix is mandatory. The biggest obstacle to user acceptance of TranSend is that it cannot be accepted through firewalls and it conflicts with end-to-end user-authentication protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the most popular form of Web security. Servers that authenticate accesses partially based on the IP address from which the request is coming will break. This SSL bug could prove to be a major setback to TranSend's success if not fixed before it goes commercial, since the bulk of the Web sites are beginning to implement user-authentication systems, most of which are rely on the IP addresses for authentication. What will this technology mean to the NC market? To compete with PCs, small-device NC manufacturers must provide a portable solution that meets the needs of remote users who require access to the Net and its resources. ProxiNet's version of the Top Gun Wingman browser, along with the TranSend proxy technology, can provide a fast, efficient way to access the Internet, gather information and have important information forwarded to users while on the road. On a higher level, ProxiNet solutions may prove to be a cost-effective way to access data on legacy systems -- a prerequisite in most corporations deploying NCs and other thin clients. On an even higher level, the TranSend technology can help relieve overburdened intranets and extranets that support thin clients. ProxiNet is in discussion with NC, networking, and browser vendors (and router manufacturer Cisco Systems, portable device manufacturer Air Touch, and Internet-access provider Metricom). ProxiNet's technology will be available online, as well as through traditional OEM channels, in mid-1998. A freeware TranSend version will be available to the general public within a few weeks of this article for those folks who can't wait for the commercial version. The proxy server will be offered in at least one flavor of Unix and on Windows NT. To date, TranSend supports only Solaris and Linux. "Our technical advantages come from being able to address specific limitations of [thin-client] devices and connection technologies using the proxy," says Fox. "What we provide is a flexible way to split responsibilities between clients and servers by providing a third point [the proxy] where some of this can be done."

Resources

• UC-Berkeley's TranSend Web accelerator
  http://transend.cs.berkeley.edu/about/
• Top Gun Wingman
  http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/pilot/wingman/
• List of publications and presentations
  http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox/pubs.html
• ProxiNet
  http://www.proxinet.com/

About the author
Cynthia Kurkowski, ComputerJournalist@Large, specializes in new and emerging technologies. She covers electronic commerce technologies for WEBster ezine (www.tgc.com), the new Web Vantage (www.web-vantage.com) and the UK's Information Interchange. Reach Cynthia at cynthia.kurkowski@ncworldmag.com.

JANUARY  1998

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