The Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Dynamic Adaptive Multicast WWW System

Abstract

Internet provides users with ubiquitous information accesses and World Wide Webs (WWW) are the most popular applications in the internet. Enormous web accesses lead to a steep increase in the amount of traffic on the internet and the load on the server, thus increasing the transmission delay and decreasing the quality of service. In this paper we explore an adaptive web service scheme which uses multicast to reduce network bandwidth and server overhead, and thus improves the performance of web accesses. The adaptive web server is able to switch responses to clients’ requests from TCP unicast to multicast and vise versa by monitoring the clients’ requests. When the requests meet a threshold, the server switches to multicast the responses instead of multiple unicasts. It is very useful for hot web pages and audio/video applications.