Towards a Customizable Web Infrastructure

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract: With the advent of the World Wide Web, there has been a fundamental shift in the way information is exchanged among systems connected to the Internet. There has been significant research in developing techniques for eliminating performance bottlenecks arising due to the lack of sufficient CPU, disk, and network bandwidths. While this research has led to greater understanding about building a Web middleware, it is not clear how a Web middleware can provide services that can be customized to suit the needs of end users. This research project aims to investigate two key ideas - support for differentiated level of services and extensibility of the Web components - to make a Web middleware more responsive and adaptive. The research will first develop components that can control and regulate allocation of resources to different requests. The research here encompasses development of a quality of service (QoS) model with respect to services and resources provided by the components, exploration of QoS architectures, extension of the QoS model over a wide area network, and investigation of a QoS model for web caching. The project will then develop components whose behavior can be customized to suit user preferences, Web object characteristics and operating conditions.