Content Migration on the World Wide Web |
The World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth as a content delivery mechanism, delivering hypertext files and static media content in a standard and consistent way. However, this content has not been able to interact with other content, making the web a distribution system rather than a distributed system. This is beginning to change, however, as distributed component architectures such as CORBA, Enterprise JavaBeans, and DCOM are being adapted to work with the web?s architecture. This paper tracks the development of the web as a distributed platform, and highlights the potential to employ an often neglected feature of distributed computing: migration. The paper argues, however, that all content on the web, be it static images or distributed components, should be free to migrate according to either the policy of the server, or the content itself. The paper goes on to describe the requirements of such a content migration mechanism, and shows how, combined with network traffic profiling, a network can be optimised by dynamically migrating content according to traffic demand.
Evans MP, Phippen AD, Müller G, Furnell SM, Sanders P, Reynolds PL