Abstract |
Over the last years, the spread of World Wide Web and the size of the content it delivers is an undoubtedly impressing phenomenon. In parallel with the fast development of web, more and more devices that are able to access the web content emerge. The age where only home computers could access the Internet has passed as portable devices, like palmtops and cell phones, deliver the same capabilities. Although mobile devices offer extended functionality, they present some limiting characteristics like small screen size, slow processor, little storage and low connectivity to the Internet. These limitations drive the need for generation of content suitable for these devices (pages and multimedia in the proper format and size) and a framework that defines the way these devices communicate and receive content from the servers. Towards this direction, a number of proposed techniques have been tested, like the temporary caching in intermediate nodes (proxies) combined with prefetching and compression techniques. The CC/PP protocol aims at the creation of a universally acceptable framework by defining a set of characteristics, upon which relies the transcoding of the data in the proper format. In order to implement this transcoding each server (final or intermediate) should know the characteristics and the capabilities of the device which puts the request. In this thesis, we propose a number of architectures based on CC/PP that include transcoding techniques on the server side, aiming at a unified World Wide Web. Additionally, a platform that implements streaming techniques and protocols for transferring multimedia content to mobile devices is demonstrated.
|