A programmable network enabling content adaptation

Abstract

Content adaptation, for delivering personalized information based on terminal capabilities, user preferences and access network topology, is still challenging although many standardization works have been done. These works lead to several formats for specifying user session information. This is based on content adaptation by service providers insofar as they know about terminal and access network capabilities. This paper presents a new solution based on a programmable network that inserts dynamically user session information into client/server exchanges. Different software modules associated to different formats can be deployed dynamically into the network on behalf of the service providers. The programmable node ensures transparency from the client point of view even in the case of TCP exchanges. The performance results show that our solution behaves better than a solution based on a proxy when no insertion is needed. On the other hand, the additional delay of this dynamic insertion is largely less than the average time for transmitting and processing requests. © Springer-Verlag 2004.