The concept of content delivery has become increasingly more important due to rapidly growing demands for efficient distribution and fast access of information from the Internet. The content can be diverse, ranging from HTML documents, images, multimedia streams, database tables to dynamically generated contents. Moreover, to facilitate ubiquitous information access, the varied network architectures and hardware devices can include broadband wired/fixed networks, bandwidth constrained wireless/mobile networks, powerful workstations/PCs, PDAs and cellular phones. The need to deliver quality information--given the nature of the content, network connections and client devices--introduces various challenges for content delivery technologies.

Web Content Delivery offers the most comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art research, providing insightful and thought-provoking possibilities for the future of web applications. Written by leading international researchers, the book focuses on web content delivery, dynamic web content, streaming media delivery and ubiquitous web access, addressing specific topics such as:

Web Workload Characterization: Ten Years Later

Replica Placement and Request Routing

The Time-to-Live Based Consistency Mechanism

Content Location in Peer-to-Peer Systems: Exploiting Locality

Techniques for Efficiently Serving and Caching Dynamic Web Content

Utility Computing for Internet Applications

Proxy Caching for Database-Backed Web Sites

Generating Internet Streaming Media Objects and Workloads

Streaming Media Caching

Policy-Based Resource Sharing in Streaming Overlay Networks

Caching and Distribution Issues for Streaming Content Distribution Networks

Peer-to-Peer Assisted Streaming Proxy

Distributed Architectures for Web Content Adaptation and Delivery

Wireless Web Performance Issues

Web Content Delivery Using Thin-Client Computing

Optimizing Content Delivery in Wireless Networks

Multimedia Adaptation and Browsing on Small Displays

Web Content Delivery is an essential reference for both academic researchers and industrial practitioners dealing with web content delivery.