The WWW is currently considered as the most promising and rapidly evolving software platform for the deployment of applications in wide area networks (telematics) as well as enterprise intranets. Another technology that proliferates rapidly in such environments is wireless communication networks (e.g., GSM, wireless LANs). The combination - merging of the two technologies (i.e., mobile computing based on the WWW) is considered of major importance to the computing industry for the forthcoming years. A survey of the research activities undertaken in this area over the previous years is reported. The different approaches that have been proposed to overcome the associated technical difficulties at different layers of the OSI reference model (e.g., the application layer, the transport/network layer) are described and compared. The presented architectures incorporate mechanisms and ideas extensively used in the area of mobile computing (e.g., caching, pre-fetching).

WWW, wireless networks, mobile computing, caching, pre-fetching, proxy