Cooperative architectures and algorithms for discovery and transcoding of multi-version content

A clear trend of the Web is that a variety of new consumer devices with diverse processing powers, display capabilities, and network connections is gaining access to the Internet. Tailoring Web content to match the device characteristics requires functionalities for content transformation, namely transcoding, that are typically carried out by the content provider or by some proxy server at the edge. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution consisting of an intermediate infrastructure of distributed servers which collaborate in discovering, transcoding, and delivering multiple versions of Web resources to the clients. We investigate different algorithms for cooperative discovery and transcoding in the context of this intermediate infrastructure where the servers are organized in hierarchical and flat peer-to-peer topologies. We compare the performance of the proposed schemes through a flexible prototype that implements all proposed mechanisms.