Web Content Adaptation

 The overwhelming success of the World Wide Web has placed dramatic pressure on the Internet infrastructure. The Internet has become a communication network that is plagued by the same problems that any network experiences. One of the major problems is high traffic. Websites can be inundated with requests and traffic for different reasons and at unpredictable times. Unless the server is constantly monitored and the website manually altered for these deluges of traffic, it can become bogged down, and no requests will be served. A proposed solution is the use of adaptive content web serving, which would enable a server to dynamically server lower grade content depending on traffic and its serving abilities at any given point in time. Use of a simple adaptive content system should increase the ability of the server to efficiently and effectively serve incoming requests by decreasing its own workload dynamically. By reducing the amount of content served on a given site, the server will be able to serve more clients, without manual intervention. The problem then is to decide when the workload justifies switching content levels. If a server can monitor its own workload in real-time, it should be able to adjust its threshold for serving lower quality content and therefore self-regulate effectively.

 At present, the enormous heterogeneity in terms of types and capacities of access devices, bandwidth of the network and needs/preferences of the users are not taken into account by a server when providing web content which is rich in images, audio and video. E.g., the server will deliver the document requested even if the terminal used can not access these content due to the limitations of the display, of the storage capacities, of processing or of access to the network. To solve this problem, alternatives must be developed that allow universal access to any type of material, from any type of device and that take into account user preferences as well as the current load on the network and on the server.

 The concept of Adaptation has been widely investigated in the field of hypermedia systems and it has been shown that in these areas it can provide better environments of use and performance. Whenever web traffic becomes too intense for the servers to serve all requests, the websites are faced with two options: either let the server bog down until traffic subsides (timeouts or extremely slow downloads), or switch to a different, toned-down version of the original page so more users can be served. The process of using a lower quality content page is known as "content degradation."

 The greatest proportion of traffic in the World Wide Web is generated by HTTP transactions between clients and Web servers. Clients interested in the data access the servers and request information from them. The servers deliver the data to the clients through the Internet. As the amount of information delivery through the Internet has rapidly grown in the last years the immediate effects were increased delays in accessing the data and the overload of the network. During peak periods Web servers may have to service many requests per second and sometimes reject some of the requests in order to satisfy the others. Some current commercial Web servers don't offer good performance when they are overloaded and they do not have mechanisms to adapt to load conditions in order to prevent the overload. Some Web servers take as much processing power to reject a connection as it would to serve it.