Title :
Optimizing download time of embedded multimedia objects for Web browsing
Author :
Loukopoulos, Thanasis ; Ahmad, Ishfaq
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Hong Kong Univ. of Sci. & Technol., China
Abstract :
Notoriously high delays in accessing Web pages loaded with massive multimedia objects are highly undesirable. Inspired by the requirements of news agencies and other information providers to include multimedia content in their pages, this paper proposes a new solution to the problem of minimizing the Web response time. We consider an environment that consists of a central multimedia repository and various sites physically dispersed. Our approach is based on simultaneous downloading of some of the embedded multimedia objects from the repository, and the rest from the regional servers. We propose a cost model to formalize the relative benefits of the proposed scheme, and design an algorithm that replicates multimedia objects so as to take advantage of concurrency in data transferring. An extensive simulation study evaluates the performance of the proposed replication policy under storage and processing capacity constraints, as well as with various network transfer rates. Comparisons are carried out with alternative schemes.
Keywords :
Internet; multimedia databases; replicated databases; Internet; Web browsing; Web response time; cost model; massive multimedia object; multimedia repository; network transfer rate; parallel download; replication policy; Concurrent computing; Costs; Delay; HTML; Internet; Statistics; Streaming media; Uniform resource locators; Web pages; Web server; 65; Internet.; Parallel downloads; Web; multimedia repository; replica placement;
Journal_Title :
Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TPDS.2004.57