Adjusting network and client variations using an active services architecture

The enormous growth of the Internet allows a wide range of different computer systems to be connected to a common network, a variety of computer systems, from a handheld to a supercomputer, can access the same services. Consequently every service provider faces the problem of offering the same service to different clients with a wide range of abilities and properties. While there are many approaches how to reach this peal, two of them are active networks [12][13] and active services [2][7]. Active networks enable users to reprogram the communication network at a packet level. The active service approach addresses a restricted and more tractable subset of the active networks design space, yet also advocating the placement of user defined computation within a network. Unlike active networks it preserves all the routing and forwarding semantics of the current Internet architecture by restricting the computation environment to the application layer. For application-level services the active-network; approach is sufficient, but not necessary. This paper presents the deployment of the active services idea in the field of web-based information retrieval in a heterogeneous network environment. Based on a developed software architecture this paper will discuss an application Web Accelerator, that has been developed to demonstrates the capabilities of this approach. The application implements an implicit set or web-based services, which process the requested information according to the medic-type and media-format as well as the client needs and requirements in order to match the user needs in the best possible way. All these services are implemented using I developed framework and without the need of any software installation an the client side. This underlines the intend of developing an infrastructure for a mart network-centric computing paradigm with a client "Thin as possible, but not thinner".