The concept of content delivery (also known as content distribution) is be coming increasingly important due to rapidly growing demands for efficient distribution and fast access of information in the Internet. Content delivery is very broad and comprehensive in that the contents for distribution cover a wide range of types with significantly different characteristics and performance concerns, including HTML documents, images, multimedia streams, database tables, and dynamically generated contents. Moreover, to facilitate ubiqui tous information access, the network architectures and hardware devices also vary widely. They range from broadband wired/fixed networks to bandwid- constrained wireless/mobile networks, and from powerful workstations/PCs to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones with limited processing and display capabilities. All these levels of diversity are introducing numerous challenges on content delivery technologies. It is desirable to deliver contents in their best quality based on the nature of the contents, network connections and client devices. This book aims at providing a snapshot of the state-of-the-art research and development activities on web content delivery and laying the foundations for future web applications. The book focuses on four main areas: (1) web con tent delivery; (2) dynamic web content; (3) streaming media delivery; and (4) ubiquitous web access. It consists of 17 chapters written by leading experts in the field. The book is designed for a professional audience including academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are interested in the most recent research and development activities on web content delivery.

The International Web Content Caching and Distribution Workshop (WCW) is a premiere technical meeting for researchers and practitioners interested in all aspects of content caching, distribution and delivery on the Internet. The 2001 WCW meeting was held on the Boston University Campus. Building on the successes of the five previous WCW meetings, WCW01 featured a strong technical program and record participation from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. This book consists of all the technical papers presented at WCW'01. It includes 20 full papers and four R&D synopses that were presented at the workshop.The collection reflects the latest research in this important area, including such topics as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), tools and methodology of performance measurements, Web characterization as relates to caching and content distribution, scalable web server architectures, cache prefetching, emerging new edge services, and delivery of streaming content.

Since the start of the International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution (WCW) in 1996, it has served as the premiere meeting for researchers and practitioners to exchange results and visions on all aspects of content caching, distribution, and delivery. Building on the success of the previous WCW meetings, WCW 2004 extended its scope and covered interesting research and deployment areas relating to content services as they move through the Internet. This year, WCW was held in Beijing, China. Although it was the first time that WCW was held in Asia, we received more than 50 high quality papers from five continents. Fifteen papers were accepted as regular papers and 6 papers as synopses to appear in the proceedings. The topics covered included architectural issues, routing and placement, caching in both traditional content delivery networks as well as in peer-- peer systems, systems management and deployment, and performance evaluation. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who submitted papers to WCW 2004 for their valued contribution to the workshop. This event would not have been possible without the broad and personal support and the invaluable suggestions and contributions of the members of the program committee and the steering committee.

"Content Delivery Networks" enables the readers to understand the basics, to identify the underlying technology, to summarize their knowledge on concepts, ideas, principles and various paradigms which span on broad CDNs areas. Therefore, aspects of CDNs in terms of basics, design process, practice, techniques, performances, platforms, applications, and experimental results have been presented in a proper order. Fundamental methods, initiatives, significant research results, as well as references for further study have also been provided. Comparison of different design and development approaches are described at the appropriate places so that new researchers as well as advanced practitioners can use the CDNs evaluation as a research roadmap. All the contributions have been reviewed, edited, processed, and placed in the appropriate order to maintain consistency so that any reader irrespective of their level of knowledge and technological skills in CDNs would get the most out of it. The book is organized into three parts, namely, Part I: CDN Fundamentals; Part II: CDN Modeling and Performance; and Part III: Advanced CDN Platforms and Applications. The organization ensures the smooth flow of material as successive chapters build on prior ones.

Following in the tradition of its popular predecessor, A Practical Guide to Content Delivery Networks, Second Edition offers an accessible and organized approach to implementing networks capable of handling the increasing data requirements of today's always on mobile society. Describing how content delivery networks (CDN) function, it provides

"Quality-Based Content Delivery over the Internet" mainly discusses the methodology of doing quality-based content delivery in an Internet environment. Because the network is becoming intelligent and active, more and more researchers are talking about achieving personalization and customization in Internet content delivery. As researchers are aware, by introducing intelligence into a web intermediary server, they can make the content delivery more efficient and of higher quality. Still, the detailed methodology of doing so is never illustrated fully. The most critical part will be the active content transformation model. This book gives a detailed description of the active content transformation model, and provides experiments and data to show its feasibility. Some examples of how to do efficient content transformation in active web intermediary to achieve high quality are also presented to help understand the whole process. The book is an introduction and excellent reference for researchers in the Internet content delivery area. Dr. Xiang Li is an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the vice director of “National Research Lab of Content Analysis”, China; Dr. Jianhua Li is a professor at the same university and the director of the same lab.

This book presents revised versions of tutorial lectures given at the IEEE/CS Symposium on modeling, analysis, and simulation of computer and telecommunication systems held in Orlando, FL, USA in October 2003. The lectures are grouped into three parts on performance and QoS of modern wired and wireless networks, current advances in performance modeling and simulation, and other specific applications of these methodologies. This tutorial book is targeted to both practitioners and researchers. The practitioner will benefit from numerous pointers to performance and QoS issues; the pedagogical style and plenty of references will be of great use in solving practical problems. The researcher and advanced student are offered a representative set of topics not only for their research value but also for their novelty and use in identifying areas of active research.

Provides a collection of authoritative articles from distinguished international researchers in information technology and Web engineering.