Digital contract approach for consistent and predictable multimedia information delivery in electronic commerce

A pure "technological" solution to network quality problems is incomplete since any benefits from new technologies are offset by the demand from exponentially growing electronic commerce (e.g., multimedia services) and data-intensive applications. Since an economic paradigm is implicit in electronic commerce, we propose a "market-system" approach to improve quality of service. Quality of service for digital products takes on a different meaning since users view quality of service (e.g., price, delay, correctness, completeness) differently and value information differently. We propose a framework for electronic commerce that is based on an economic paradigm and mass-customization, and works as a wide-area distributed management system. In our framework, surrogate-servers act as intermediaries between information providers and end-users, and arrange for consistent and predictable information delivery through "digital contracts." These contracts are negotiated and priced based on economic principles. Surrogate servers pre-fetch, through replication, information from many different servers and consolidate based on demand expectations. In order to recognize users' requirements and process requests accordingly, real-time databases are central to our framework. We also propose that multimedia information be separated into slowly changing and rapidly changing data streams to improve response time requirements. Surrogate-servers perform the tasks of integration of these data streams that is transparent to end-users.