[e2e] Pointers to dynamic content delivery research.

[Micah Beck]

Amr,

I recommend you look at the paper entitled "Enabling Full Service Surrogates
Using the Portable Channel Representation" by Beck, Moore, Abrahamsson,
Achouiantz and Johansson
 that appeared in the 10th Intl. WWW Conference
(http://www.www10.org/cdrom/papers/212/index.html).  The Portable Channel
Representation (PCR) is an outgrowth of the Internet Distributed Storage
Initiative (I2-DSI), an academic project that I lead, and which involves
researchers in Content Distribution at the Universities of Tennessee and
North Carolina, and infrastructure and content partners at a number of other
institutions (http://dsi.internet2.edu). We are currently seeking to provide
support for Digital Library projects with active services among others.

Note: the term "dynamic content" is used in the industry to mean cacheable
Web content that simply changes very often, and may require server-driven
invalidation.  Services that are provided by scripts and programs and that
are uncachable due to the need for processing present a different problem,
so I refer to these as "active services" or "active content".  This avoids
confusion.

I2-DSI predates many of the companies in the Content Distribution field, and
differs from most other efforts in that it has focused on mirroring of
active services rather than simple caching of static content.  The Portable
Channel Representation is a mechnaism for specifying a copy of a service,
capturing not only source objects but also associated service metadata.

PCR is intended as an open interface, and is under continued development at
the University of Tennessee.  If you have an interest in working on this
problem, you might want to consider using PCR as a tool or seeking a
collaboration with the I2-DSI project.  We have plans to make an open source
Java version of a simple content distribution framework based on PCR
available to the public.

Full disclosure: PCR is used as the basis for a commercial Content
Distribution product, developed by Lokomo Systems, a company of which I am
Chief Scientist (http://www.lokomo.com).  Lokomo Systems is commited to
preserving PCR as an open interface, and may collaborate in the open source
project.

Micah Beck
Research Associate Professor
Innovative Computing Laboratory
University of Tennessee

----- Original Message -----
From: "Amr A. Awadallah" <aaa at cs.stanford.edu>
To: <end2end-interest at postel.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 3:18 PM
Subject: [e2e] Pointers to dynamic content delivery research.


>
> Hi,
>
>   I am looking for pointers to previous research work in the area of
dynamic
> interactive content delivery, i.e. how can services be moved closer to
demand
> hot spots, e.g. maps.yahoo.com is a dynamic interactive service for which
> caching the map static image returned is useless since each user is
looking at
> a different map, but the underlying server code and geo database could be
> cached since it is the same for all users. The hard part is providing
mobility
> for such a service given all code dependencies it might have.
>
>   There is a bunch of companies out there working on this problem (a brief
> list attached at end of this e-mail), but I am looking for published
academic
> research in this field.
>
> Thanks and have a happy 4th,
>
> -- Amr
>
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>
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>