Quality of service and electronic newspaper: The Etel solution

Making electronic newspapers available to users is an attractive business f or newspaper editors. The production of electronic newspapers may a priori be realized at low cost using the editor's news base, while enabling to att ain a larger audience. However, the success of an electronic newspaper in a commercial setting depends upon the provided quality of service. The newsp aper 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 h igh quality of service to users. Content quality is achieved through the de sign and production of electronic editions in close collaboration with a ne wspaper editor. Access quality is realized through the design and implement ation of a dedicated client-server distributed system. The proposed distrib uted system exploits the specifics of electronic newspapers. Precisely, mos t newspaper readers systematically consult the various editions of their us ual newspaper in the same way (e.g. a reader may consult his newspaper by f irst reading local and then sport pages). In the context of an electronic n ewspaper, this means that we can safely assume the existence of user profil es in terms of access patterns to newspaper editions. This feature allows u s to propose profile-based automatic prefetching and load balancing strateg ies, which together enable to offer a highly responsive and scalable distri buted system.