Adapting to network and client variation using infrastructuralproxies: lessons and perspectives
Fox, A.; Gribble, S.D.; Chawathe, Y.; Brewer, E.A.
Personal Communications, IEEE
Volume 5, Issue 4, Aug 1998 Page(s):10 - 19
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/98.709365
Summary:Today's Internet clients vary widely with respect to both hardware
and software properties: screen size, color depth, effective bandwidth,
processing power, and the ability to handle different data formats. The
order-of-magnitude span of this variation is too large to hide at the
network level, making application-level techniques necessary. We show
that on-the-fly adaptation by transformational proxies is a widely
applicable, cost-effective, and flexible technique for addressing all
these types of variations. To support this claim, we describe our
experience with data-type-specific distillation (lossy compression) in a
variety of applications. We also argue that placing adaptation machinery
in the network infrastructure, rather than inserting it into end
servers, enables incremental deployment and amortization of operating
costs. To this end, we describe a programming model for large-scale
interactive Internet services and a scalable cluster-based framework
that has been in production use at UC Berkeley since April 1997. We
present a detailed examination of TranSend, a scalable transformational
Web proxy deployed on our cluster framework, and give descriptions of
several handheld-device applications that demonstrate the wide
applicability of the proxy-adaptation philosophy
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