Designing self-adaptive websites using online hotlink assignment algorithm

Abstract

An online hotlink assignment algorithm is proposed for designing adaptive websites. The objective is to reach desired pages on a website in minimum number of clicks, thereby reducing the load on the web server. As a consequence, the traffic on the internet is also reduced. The hotlinks are assigned based on the frequency of access of pages. We model a website as a single source directed graph. Optimal hotlink assignment problem is NP-hard for general graphs. The website graph is reduced to a Breadth First Search (BFS) tree which maintains the semantic relationships between web pages. The proposed online algorithm can place at most k hotlinks per page with a maximum of l hotlinks on the entire website, where k«l. The input stream is simulated using the Zipf distribution. The results presented in the paper compare the performance of the online algorithm with the optimal offline algorithm.