Dynamically Transcoding Data Quality for Faster Web Access

To survive in the "world-wide-wait" Internet environment, web surfers are often forced to tradeoff Web object quality for bandwidth by turning off the graphics or Java related objects through the browser configuration. Alternatively, the Web site owner might provide a lower bandwidth version of the Web pages statically. These solutions are not satisfactory because they can not make the best use of the available network bandwidth. To balance between the quality and the bandwidth, we propose a novel layered data model for Web multimedia data. Together with dynamic bandwidth negotiation and a best-fit mechanism, client can get the most appropriate version of a Web request. To make all these transparent to the clients, the layered data model and its associated best-fit mechanism will be implemented in the proxy server. This result is especially important to mobile devices for its limited bandwidth.