Over the past decades, the expansion of the converged Web-based facilities/infrastructures, together with new business perspectives, have created new needs for all (potential) categories of end-users. Although various effects were significant in most sectors (European Commission, 2005) the fast progress has, however, promoted more complex issues, especially for the delivery of multimedia-based applications. It is now a common view that there is a growing need for delivering high-quality services in the scope of liberalized and competitive markets, where multiple factors of different origin (i.e., technological, business, economic, regulatory, social, etc.) can drastically affect further deployment, establishment or upgrading of existing infrastructures and of any possible (innovative) services offered through them, especially if considering the continuous expansion of the broadband perspective (Chochliouros, & Spiliopoulou, 2005). Furthermore, multimedia applications are bandwidth consuming and new applications for absorbing the available assets appear. As the “converged” sector of information technologies, communication, and media industries is currently on the “edge” of a crucial phase of growth, several challenges appear in the global scene: Appropriate infrastructures for delivering mails, exchanging data files (of various forms of content) and simple Web browsing are now required to be adopted and used, to support the streaming of multimedia content and, simultaneously, to “compose” a reliable means of transmitting information between several entities (physical and legal persons) using digital facilities. Although technological advances have enhanced the deployment of faster (lesser latency) and greater (more bandwidth) “network lines” possessing significant advantages, the demands of the extravagant use of Internet from users worldwide (Dilley, Maggs, Parikh, Prokop, Sitaraman, & Weihl, 2002; Shoniregun, Chochliouros, Laperche, Logvynovskiy, & Spiliopoulou-Chochliourou, 2004), together with an extensive variance of services offered, were primary motives for researchers to develop a specific category of modern infrastructures, known as content distribution (or delivery) networks (CDNs) (Hull, 2002; Verma, 2002). The development of suitable content delivery networking comprises one of the most important challenges in the global networking area, together with the expansion of various IP trends. Content networks influence high-layer network intelligence to efficiently manage the delivery of various forms of data (which is becoming progressively more multimedia in nature). At an initial stage, they were built upon the structure of the public Internet (Saroiu, Gummadi, Dunn, Gribble, & Levy, 2002), to accelerate Web site performance (Johnson, Carr, Day, & Frans Kaashoek, 2000). This option has been fulfilled in numerous cases, and such intelligent network tools can be applied in other beneficial and profitable ways.
AEGIS: a wildfire prevention and management information system
