etwork Traffic Reduction by Hypertext Compression
BEN CHOI & NAKUL BHARADE
Computer Science, College of Engineering and
Science
Louisiana Tech University, Ruston,
LA 71272,
USA
pro@BenChoi.org
Abstract: This paper proposes a three-step process to reduce the size of hypertext documents for reducing the network traffic on the Internet. With the explosive growth in the number of users on the Internet, the bandwidth demand has grown tremendously. Before the improvement of network infrastructures can meet the demand, this paper addresses the problem by reducing the size of HTML documents that currently occupies majority of the network traffic on the Internet. The proposed process consists of three steps: (1) shrinking HTML documents by removing data that will not alter the appearance and the function, (2) encoding HTML documents by representing most frequent used tags and words with single bytes, and (3) compressing HTML documents by using standard compression utilities. Our test results show that the proposed process achieves a reduction ratio of 81% on average. We also developed a browser plug-in program that provides transparent access for the users when viewing the reduced-size HTML documents. With the plug-in program, the users will not see any differences when viewing the reduced-sized HTML documents comparing to the original ones. They will, however, experience a reduction in retrieval latency on average of 15%.
Keywords: network traffic, retrieval latency, hypertext, compression, and shrinking
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