International Business Machines Corporation

Nelson R Manohar

Leon Lumelsky

Stephen Peter Wood

Philip Shi-lung Yu

Marc Hubert Willebeek-LeMair

Leon L Lumelsky

An interactive and dynamically customizable guided tour of some portion of the World Wide Web monitors and dynamically adapts in response to like-minded users as well as provides recommendations during the traversal. The invention includes features for: electronic commerce; side trips; true visiting of Web sites; maps; pre-fetching of Web objects; insertion of interactive decision points; customized insertion of advertisements; simultaneous traversal of multiple hyperpaths; collection of and dynamic modification of a tour based on collected route information and/or touring statistics.

Dynamic customized web tours

A Resource Management Framework (RMF) comprises an extensible, distributed, policy-based, object-oriented system and method for resource discovery and negotiation during the setup and control of a media session between one or more media servers and end users. The scope of the RMF framework is the management of multimedia resources used during simple, non-interactive as well as composite, complex, interactive multimedia sessions. The RMF enables iterative negotiated mapping over the requirements of an RMF-compliant application onto the offerings of one or more RMF-compliant media servers. It is an open-services architecture providing the ability to insert and apply services to enhance the suitability of offerings to requirements and vice versa, during a negotiated mapping session. Moreover, the RMF negotiated mapping algorithm itself is customizable via the use of policies (herein referred to as per-flow policies). The policies used to drive management decisions and service selections during these negotiated mapping are 'pluggable'. New or updated policies may be added, to augment or replace an existing policy so as to realize new behavior or refine existing behavior.

Policy-based multivariate application-level QoS negotiation for multimedia services

A distributed system for the management of distributed resources interconnected by a computer network and comprised of a plurality of limited supply resources (such as those associated with multimedia content servers, e.g., bandwidth, CPU, storage, etc.,). The system comprises a plurality of server resources, preferably with target multimedia content, real time processing engines, etc., and a plurality of intermediary system resources (such as directories and resource monitors). The resources in any particular server are classified or partitioned as global or local, where the ratio of global to local is specified and controlled by the system. The system assigns clients across local and global resources and coordinates the placement of replicas of target content across global resources. The placement is dynamic and performed when necessary based on the analysis of utilization patterns of target content and replicas by pluralities of clients.

Self-regulated resource management of distributed computer resources

A system and method for dynamically shaping available capacity of multi-media objects based on aggregated demand across distributed media/world-wide-web servers. Demand statistics (e.g., volume and density) for a given web object are used to characterize aggregated behavior with respect to request arrival time. The system dynamically shapes capacity by controlling, over time, the number of replicas of objects made available to such requests as well as the placement of such replicas. The system also enables on-demand replication of web objects across web servers by providing: (a) a ranking criteria to prioritize among web objects according to past demand; and, (b) a trigger criteria to determine when to apply the capacity shaping mechanism. The system effectively allows one or more media servers to share the streaming resources provided by a globally shared media server in such a way that the capacity of each media server is temporarily, and transparently augmented as needed to match predicted demand for its objects.

System and method for capacity shaping in an internet environment

A system providing access to web objects that matches predicted demand for web objects to available capacity on web servers. The system implements methods to dynamically shape both demand and capacity based on certain criteria. The system provides methods to dynamically shape demand for an object based on criteria such as arrival time, incoming geography, and costs requirements. In particular, the present invention characterizes future demand for an object based on aggregation and forecasting of past demand for such object. The system effectively permits control and customization of capacity across one or more media servers based on characteristics associated with the demand across one or more of them, and particularly, based on the dominating geographical traits of past demand. Moreover, the system dynamically shapes capacity by: (a) controlling the number of replicas associated with an object; and, (b) controlling the placement of these replicas across servers in a distributed network. In particular, the system drives capacity shaping measures over a particular object based on its predicted demand. Consequently, the number and location of replicas associated with an object is made to be variable over time and driven by predicted demand for a web object.

System and method for integrated load distribution and resource management on internet environment

A system and method for configuring service-oriented resources suitable for the resource management in a media server and more particularly, for resource configuration across distributed media servers. Heterogeneous media serves are configured in terms of homogeneous service-oriented resource units each used to represent a resource allocation commitment from a participating server for provisioning a particular media service on demand. A service unit associated with each different service supported by a media server represents an envelope of resource requirements as needed for provisioning a service. The method includes generating a resource envelope, and additionally compensating, at a media server, for differences between true resource utilization and resource envelope projected by a service unit. Each service unit also comprises a signature representing metadata used to control access to a service unit by defining rights, privileges, and characteristics of services that may use that particular server unit.

Management of service-oriented resources across heterogeneous media servers using homogenous service units and service signatures to configure the media servers

The present invention switches a source of a streaming session between a primary server and its client, from the primary server to another server at arbitrary points during the progress of the streaming session. The switching of the source is accomplished through the use of a virtual socket capable of simultaneously phasing in a new streaming connection while phasing out an old streaming connection during a streaming session that preserves the temporal progress of the session. The virtual socket acts as a client-based intermediary between the client and one or more streaming servers, thus enabling a client application to establish a streaming connection with respect to content and not to the end-party, i.e., server.

System for seamless streaming of data stored on a network of distributed primary and target servers using segmentation information exchanged among all servers during streaming

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New York, NY, United States of America

Nelson R Manohar