Systematic multiresolution and its application to the World Wide Web

Many emerging environments are increasingly facing the problem where the requirements of applications easily outstrip the system resources. This is particularly acute in the World Wide Web (WWW) and many data-intensive applications like OLAP and multimedia databases. We address this problem in the Web context via systematic multiresolution, i.e., a framework for providing responses at different qualities (resolutions) and costs. We validate our conceptual contributions by implementing NetBlitz a multiresolution-based proxy server on the WWW. NetBlitz addresses two key problems facing the Web: high latencies and heterogeneity of client resources and requirements. It solves these problems by dynamically generating the "required version" of a Web object based on client preferences and capabilities. We also propose novel multiresolution-aware caching techniques that further improve performance. Finally we experimentally demonstrate the utility of multiresolution and the caching enhancements proposed.