Enhancing hyperlink structure for improving web performance

  • Authors:

  • Jurek Czyzowicz;Evangelos Kranakis;Danny Krizanc;Andrzej Pelc;Miguel Vargas Martin

  • Affiliations:

  • Département d'Informatique, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Hull, Québec, Canada;School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada;Department of Mathematics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut;Département d'Informatique, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Hull, Québec, Canada;School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

In a Web site, each page v has a certain probability pv of being requested by a user. The access cost of a Web site is the sum of pv ċ c(r; v), of every page v, where c(r, v) is the cost of the shortest path between the home page, r, and page v. The cost of a path is measured in two ways. One measure is in terms of its length, where the cost of the path is simply the number of hyperlinks in it. The other measure is in terms of the data transfer generated for traversing the path. This research work concerns the problem of minimizing the access cost of a Web site by adding hotlinks over its underlying structure. We propose an improvement on Web site access by making the most popular pages more accessible to users. We do this by assigning hotlinks to the existing structure of the Web site. The problem of finding an optimal assignment of hotlinks is known as the hotlink assignment problem. We present heuristic algorithms which are tested and compared by simulation on real and random Web sites. We develop The Hotlink Optimizer (HotOpt), a new software tool that finds an assignment of hotlinks reducing the access cost of a Web site. HotOpt is empowered by one of the algorithms presented in this paper.