Check out the new USENIX Web site. next up previous
Next: Burstiness Up: System Design Issues for Previous: Summary

System Design Experience from TranSend

 

The TranSend middleware service provides distillation ([13], [14]) services for the Berkeley Home IP modem user population, representing roughly 8,000 active users of a bank of 600-700 modems. Distillation is data-type specific, lossy compression - for example, a distilled image may have reduced resolution or color depth, sacrificing image quality for compactness of representation. Although a small additional latency is introduced by performing distillation, the byte-wise savings realized by the more compact distilled representations more than compensates for the latency of performing the distillation, resulting in a factor of 3-7 reduction in the end-to-end latency of delivering web content to users over their slow modem links. It was therefore an explicit design goal of TranSend to help mitigate the heterogeneity of Internet clients by adapting servers' content to clients' needs.





Steve Gribble
Tue Oct 21 15:56:39 PDT 1997