A flexible architecture for customizing web streams for wireless clients

We present the design of the Web Stream Customizer Architecture, the basis for a middleware system that supports customization of Web content and streams. Our notion of customization is quite general, including functions such as mtering, remote buffering, remote caching, flow regulation (e.g., for video playback), compression, and encryption, all of which are especially valuable for wireless resource· limited clients, which are a primary target of support. The system is highly deployable, as it works entirely within the Web's common programming and communication frameworks, such as using HTTP and relying solely on standard proxy mechanisms, and therefore does not require any changes to existing Web servers and browsers.