Fine grained content-based adaptation mechanism for providing high end-user quality of experience with adaptive hypermedia systems

New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information "anytime, anywhere". However, the network environments allowing this "anytime, anywhere" access may have widely varying performance characteristics such as bandwidth, level of congestion, mobility support, and cost of transmission. It is unrealistic to expect that the quality of delivery of the same content can be maintained in this variable environment, but rather an effort must be made to fit the content served to the current delivery conditions, thus ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) to the users. This paper introduces an end-user QoE-aware adaptive hypermedia framework that extends the adaptation functionality of adaptive hypermedia systems with a fine-grained content-based adaptation mechanism. The proposed mechanism attempts to take into account multiple factors affecting QoE in relation to the delivery of Web content. Various simulation tests investigate the performance improvements provided by this mechanism, in a home-like, low bit rate operational environment, in terms of access time per page, aggregate access time per browsing session and quantity of transmitted information