Interactive internet activities are a very popular means for gathering
information for business, personal, medical, entertainment and other
purposes. Most internet interaction is asymmetrical in nature in that a
client's requests for information are much smaller (in data size) than the
resulting information delivered by the server. Although the
client/internet link is inherently asymmetrical, there remains a great
deal of interaction and overhead required between the client and the
server that increases the bandwidth needs for the client's upstream
request channel. There are many advantages to reducing this upstream
traffic volume and thereby making the internet interaction even more
asymmetrical. Such compression of request data could allow more clients to
utilize a single upstream data path instead of separate paths.