Taxonomy of network transcoding

Abstract

Universal access to the WWW is the vision in which all information, from any source, can be accessed anywhere, by any devices, in a consistent and straightforward way. However, the existing web paradigm in which the web server defines the content delivered to the Internet client device has hindered content accessibility for pervasive and ubiquitous devices. When delivering information over the Internet to pervasive and ubiquitous devices, content providers face the considerable challenge of sending and presenting content in a way that makes it usable to resource-limited devices. Transcoding is instrumental to enabling universal access to the web for pervasive and ubiquitous computing devices. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of transcoding techniques. The main contributions of the proposed taxonomy are i) to provide a road map of the work accomplished to date by presenting dimensions of characteristics derived from our study of transcoding models and techniques, and ii) to help identify unsolved problems that exist in the domain today. Based on the proposed taxonomy, we have analyzed several existing commercially available systems, and investigated possible future improvements on these technologies.