Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Computer-to-computer data routing – Least weight routing
Reexamination Certificate
1997-10-28
2003-07-15
Luu, Le Hien (Department: 2141)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Computer-to-computer data routing
Least weight routing
C709S219000, C709S232000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06594682
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD
This invention relates to client-server systems and methods for obtaining Web related content from one or more servers and presenting that content to a user. More particularly, this invention further relates to client-side software and devices that facilitate delivery and presentation of the Web content.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Public networks, and most notably the Internet, are emerging as a primary conduit for communications, entertainment, and business services. The Internet is a network formed by the cooperative interconnection of computing networks, including local and wide area networks. It interconnects computers from around the world with existing and even incompatible technologies by employing common protocols that smoothly integrate the individual and diverse components.
The Internet has recently been popularized by the overwhelming and rapid success of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web). The Web links together various topics in a complex, non-sequential web of associations which permit a user to browse from one topic to another, regardless of the presented order of topics. The Web is rapidly evolving as a standard for distributing, finding, and accessing information of any type. A “Web browser” is an application that executes on the user's computer to navigate the Web. The Web browser allows a user to retrieve and render hypermedia content from the WWW, including text, sound, images, video, and other data.
The amazing growth rate in the demand for data over the Internet is partly due to an increasing audience. The World Wide Web has crossed the threshold that makes it affordable and interesting to a much larger audience. There is information available on a very wide variety of topics, and tools exist to help people find and view the information cost effectively.
Another factor fueling the Internet growth is the exploding amount of information that is now available on the Web. The Web has grown from thousands of Web sites to several million Web sites in a very short period of time. The growth continues at an exponential rate. Many corporations and libraries are translating paper and microfilm information archives to electronic media that is published via the Web or similar network. While this has resulted in a wealth of information that is now available to virtually anyone, the information is poorly organized and the sheer volume of the information makes it hard for a typical person to sort through, find, and retrieve specific information.
The shift from paper published media to online media also created a new problem. People wishing to access Web information are limited to accessing it only when connected to the Internet or other network. Network connectivity is largely restricted to a physical wire connection to the computer, or a virtual connection to wireless transmission networks. This makes it hard, if not impossible, to disconnect the computer from the network and still access information.
As more information is brought online, the demand on the computational and network resources to categorize, search, personalize, and retrieve the information is placing new demands on the existing client-server infrastructure that makes up networks like the Web. Additionally, the data demands are affected by a trend for Web sites to evolve from serving pure text to serving richer media content, including graphics, sound, and video. Adding richer media content is popular because it presents information more clearly and attractively, thereby enhancing a site's impact and popularity.
Due to these emerging factors, a significant problem facing the continued growth and acceptance of the Internet is that conventional methods for accessing the Web do not scale well to meet the rapid growth in supply and demand, or to satisfy the need for better organization. The quality of service for the Web is intuitively measured by the user as the amount of time it takes to search, find, request, and receive data from the Web. Internet users have been conditioned through their experiences with television and standalone multimedia applications to expect instantaneous results on demand. Users are accustomed to changing the TV channel and instantaneously viewing the video content for that channel on the screen. Unfortunately, the Internet is unable to deliver data instantaneously. For the most part, the Internet has significant latency problems that reduce fairly routine Web browsing exercises to protracted lessons in patience.
The basic dilemma is that the quality of service degrades as more people try to use the Web. More unsettling is the corollary that service for popular Web sites is typically much worse than service for unpopular sites. There are several causes of the service problem, including overburdened servers and slow distribution networks.
Networks often have too little bandwidth to adequately distribute the data. “Bandwidth” is the amount of data that can be moved through a particular network segment at any one time. The Internet is a conglomerate of different technologies with different associated bandwidths. Distribution over the Internet is usually constrained by the segment with the lowest available bandwidth.
In the consumer market, for example, most clients typically connect to the Internet via a local modem connection to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This connection is generally enable a maximum data rate of 14.4 Kbps (Kilobits per second) to 28.8 Kbps. Some clients might employ an ISDN connection, which facilitates data flow in the range of 128-132 Kbps.
The ISP connects to the primary distribution network using a higher bandwidth pipeline, such as a T1 connection that can facilitate a maximum data flow of approximately 1.5 Mbps. This bandwidth is available to serve all of the clients of the ISP so that each client can consume a 14.4 Kbps, 28.8 Kbps, or 128 Kbps slice of the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth. As more clients utilize the ISP services, however, there is less available bandwidth to satisfy the subscriber requests. If too many requests are received, the ISP becomes overburdened and is not able to adequately service the requests in a timely manner, causing frustration to the users.
Couple this problem with the fact that clients typically go underutilized. While servers are pushed to their maximum output limits, clients often sit idle for many hours per day.
Because the bandwidth issue is constrained by technology development in the physical network architecture, early attempts to solve these problems focused on organizing the Web content in some manner to better facilitate search and retrieval. This in turn enabled users to more quickly access information on the Internet, even though the underlying physical architecture remained the same.
The earliest solutions involve organizing the information by hand. Humans review information by browsing the Internet and assemble large lists of documents containing similar information. The lists are further organized into hierarchies of categorized content. People can view the categorized lists online in an attempt to more quickly obtain a specific piece of information. The advantage of this scheme is that human reviewers are very good at categorizing the information and discarding low-value documents, so the lists of categorized information contain fairly high value information. Some hand-categorized data schemes are organized into popular Web sites. The best known example of this is the “Yahoo!” Web site.
The disadvantage of this human-driven technique is that it becomes more difficult to keep up when the amount of information grows exponentially. The categorized lists are frequently out of date or inadequate. Additionally, the method requires a user to be connected to the network to view the information.
Another approach is to use massive search engines that automatically retrieve documents on the Web and attempt to index all of the information. The technique of fetching this information is known as “web-crawling” or “web-scraping”. Heuristic document categorization algorithms index the information a
D'Souza David J.
Ellerman Erik Castedo
Endres Raymond E.
Freedman Steven J.
Jiggins Julian P.
Lee & Hayes PLLC
Luu Le Hien
Microsoft Corporation
Willett Stephan
LandOfFree
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