An architecture for effective push/pull Web surfing

World Wide Web (WWW) pages are the vehicle of complex information generated from different sources and with different objectives. This paper proposes to complement the ordinary, pull based, Web browsing architecture by exploiting readily available technologies which address the requirements of a large part of the information. In our solution, push technology and IP multicasting enable the source originated delivery of content to multiple users. Moreover, the real time protocol offers a means to address the delivery of time sensitive content. Ordinary WWW browsers have been used to prove the effectiveness of the proposal in a prototype implementation. Advertising banner delivery, news multicasting and fair electronic auctions are among the target applications of our solution