Enabling the Internet to Deliver Content-Oriented Services
20 June 2001
Increasing Web traffic has led to the deployment of network intermediaries at the edges of the network. In particular, caching proxies and content delivery surrogates have been very successful in accelerating Web content delivery and reducing the load on origin Web servers. Today, however, users and content providers are demanding faster distribution of Web content to end users. Also, many users are looking to their ISPs to provide additional content-oriented services, including filtering, security, personalization, and transformation services. At the same time, ISPs and other service providers are facing increased competition - which drives slimmer margins for basic access and data transport services. These recent developments suggest utilizing the existing network edge infrastructure as a platform for a new class of intelligent services. These services provide tangible benefits for the end user and incremental revenue opportunity for the service providers. This article explains a flexible and open architecture to enable network edge intermediaries to host a variety of content-oriented services. Special emphasis is put on the representation and processing of rules leading to the invocation of these services. This article also describes a research prototype implementation of a service- enabled intermediary and several example services.