Adaptive Multimedia Content Delivery for Scalable Web Servers

• Main Author: Pradhan, Rahul
• Other Authors: Micha Hofri, Department Head
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital WPI 2001
• Subjects: Multimedia; Content Adaptation; Scalable; Content Delivery; Web servers; Multimedia systems; Load sharing
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/etd-theses/643; https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1642&context=etd-theses

The phenomenal growth in the use of the World Wide Web often places a heavy load on networks and servers, threatening to increase Web server response time and raising scalability issues for both the network and the server. With the advances in the field of optical networking and the increasing use of broadband technologies like cable modems and DSL, the server and not the network, is more likely to be the bottleneck. Many clients are willing to receive a degraded, less resource intensive version of the requested content as an alternative to connection failures. In this thesis, we present an adaptive content delivery system that transparently switches content depending on the load on the server in order to serve more clients. Our system is designed to work for dynamic Web pages and streaming multimedia traffic, which are not currently supported by other adaptive content approaches. We have designed a system which is capable of quantifying the load on the server and then performing the necessary adaptation. We designed a streaming MPEG server and client which can react to the server load by scaling the quality of frames transmitted. The main benefits of our approach include: transparent content switching for content adaptation, alleviating server load by a graceful degradation of server performance and no requirement of modification to existing server software, browsers or the HTTP protocol. We experimentally evaluate our adaptive server system and compare it with an unadaptive server. We find that adaptive content delivery can support as much as 25% more static requests, 15% more dynamic requests and twice as many multimedia requests as a non-adaptive server. Our, client-side experiments performed on the Internet show that the response time savings from our system are quite significant.