Adaptive push-pull: disseminating dynamic Web data

Abstract

An important issue in the dissemination of time-varying web data such as sports scores and stock prices is the maintenance of temporal coherency. In the case of servers adhering to the HTTP protocol, clients need to frequently pull the data based on the dynamics of the data and a user's coherency requirements. In contrast, servers that possess push capability maintain state information pertaining to clients and push only those changes that are of interest to a user. These two canonical techniques have complementary properties with respect to the level of temporal coherency maintained, communication overheads, state space overheads, and loss of coherency due to (server) failures. In this paper, we show how to combine push and pull-based techniques to achieve the best features of both approaches. Our combined technique tailors the dissemination of data from servers to clients based on 1) the capabilities and load at servers and proxies and 2) clients' coherency requirements. Our experimental results demonstrate that such adaptive data dissemination is essential to meet diverse temporal coherency requirements, to be resilient to failures, and for the efficient and scalable utilization of server and network resources.