Quality of Service and Electronic Newspaper: The Etel Solution

Abstract

Making electronic newspapers available to users is an attractive business for newspaper editors. The production of electronic newspapers may a priori be realized at low cost using the editor’s news base, while enabling to attain a larger audience. However, the success of an electronic newspaper in a commercial setting depends upon the provided quality of service. The newspaper must guarantee to its users, both content quality in terms of reading comfort, and access quality in terms of response time. This paper presents the Etel electronic newspaper whose main design objective is to guarantee high quality of service to users. Content quality is achieved through the design and production of electronic editions in close collaboration with a newspaper editor. Access quality is realized through the design and implementation of a dedicated client-server distributed system. The proposed distributed system exploits the specifics of electronic newspapers. Precisely, most newspaper readers systematically consult the various editions of their usual newspaper in the same way (e.g. a reader may consult his newspaper by first reading local and then sport pages). In the context of an electronic newspaper, this means that we can safely assume the existence of user profiles in terms of access patterns to newspaper editions. This feature allows us to propose profile-based automatic prefetching and load balancing strategies, which together enable to offer a highly responsive and scalable distributed system.