Conclusion

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet has made itself more and more heterogeneous. Users vary a lot in their hardware, software and network condition. To make the situation more complicated, they want more content personalization and customization. This makes the “good-service” content delivery no longer a simple concept. Download speed of a web page is still a basic requirement, on top of which best-fit content delivery, content access control and policy enforcement are also required. Each solution on web server or client browser has its limitations. Researchers today are seeking solutions on web intermediary servers. Active web intermediaries were first defined in active network. Now it is adopted into content delivery framework to provide good quality services. So far there have been some transformation proxy servers such as Pythia and TranSend. Industry is also pushing protocols which include I-CAP, SOAP and OPES. However, we believe that there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed. In this book, we proposed several models for better understanding and developing of such active web intermediaries. Together we presented the actual system framework and design considerations for the implementation.