A two-level distributed architecture for the support of content adaptation and delivery services

The growing demand for Web and multimedia content accessed through heterogeneous devices requires the providers to tailor resources to the device capabilities on-the-fly. Providing services for content adaptation and delivery opens two novel challenges to the present and future content provider architectures: content adaptation services are computationally expensive; the global storage requirements increase because multiple versions of the same resource may be generated for different client devices. We propose a novel two-level distributed architecture for the support of efficient content adaptation and delivery services. The nodes of the architecture are organized in two levels: thin edge nodes on the first level act as simple request gateways towards the nodes of the second level; fat interior clusters perform all the other tasks, such as content adaptation, caching and fetching. Several experimental results show that the Two-level architecture achieves better performance and scalability than that of existing flat or no cooperative architectures.