Adapting content to client resources in the Internet

We address the delivery of composite multimedia documents, namely Web pages, over the Internet to clients with diverse resources and capabilities. We do so by adapting the multimedia content to meet the client device characteristics. We model the adaptation process as a resource allocation problem in a generalized rate-distortion framework. In this framework, we address the issue of both multiple media types in a Web document and multiple resource types at the client. We extend this framework to allow prioritization on the content items in a Web document. We illustrate our content adaptation technique with a Web server that adapts multimedia news stories to clients as diverse as workstations, PDAs and cellular phones.