| Web caching and content delivery technologies provide the infrastructure on which systems are built for the scalable distribution of information. This proceedings of the eighth annual workshop, captures a cross-section of the latest issues and techniques of interest to network architects and researchers in large-scale content delivery. Topics covered include the distribution of streaming multimedia, edge caching and computation, multicast, delivery of dynamic content, enterprise content delivery, streaming proxies and servers, content transcoding, replication and caching strategies, peer-to-peer content delivery, and Web prefetching.
Web Content Caching and Distribution encompasses all areas relating to the intersection of storage and networking for Internet content services. The book is divided into eight parts: mobility, applications, architectures, multimedia, customization, peer-to-peer, performance and measurement, and delta encoding.
While originally scheduled to be held in Beijing, China, the workshop moved to the US this year as a result of the concerns over the SARS virus. We are indebted to our industrial sponsor, IBM, for providing the facilities in which to hold the workshop. The T.J. Watson Research Center that serves as our venue spans three sites across two states, and is the headquarters for the eight IBM research labs worldwide. We are also grateful to the members of the program committee for helping to select a strong program, and to the members of the steering committee who continue to provide advice and guidance, even as plans are made for next year’s workshop.
We expect that multimedia and data traffic will surpass the traditional voice traffic in mobile networks by the year 2005 [18]. High quality streaming multimedia content is likely to form a significant portion of this traffic. It is therefore important that large mobile networks find ways to manage client traffic and data efficiently.
Content distribution networks (CDN) have proven effective for managing contentbased traffic for large numbers of clients in the Internet. CDN consist of surrogate servers that replicate the content of the origin servers and serve it to the clients. CDN employ server selection and request redirection methods for selecting an appropriate (surrogate) server and redirecting the client’s request to that server. CDN reduce load on both the network and origin server by localizing the traffic and providing many alternate sources of content. Iyengar et al., [8] provide an overview of existing CDN technologies. |