Many world wide web applications require access, transfer, and synchronization of large multimedia data objects (MDOs) (such as, audio, video, and images) across the communication network. The transfer of large MDOs across the network contributes to the response time observed by the end users. As the end users expect strict adherence to response time constraints, the problem of allocating these MDOs so as to minimize response time becomes very challenging. The problem becomes more complex in

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... context of hypermedia documents (web pages), wherein these MDOs need to be synchronized during presentation to the end users. Since the basic problem of data allocation in distributed database systems is NP-complete, a need exists to pursue and evaluate solutions based on heuristics for generating near-optimal MDO allocations. In this paper, we i) conceptualize this problem by using a navigational model to represent hypermedia documents and their access behavior from end users, ii) formulate the problem by developing a base case cost model for response time, iii) design two algorithms to find near-optimal solutions for allocating MDOs of the hypermedia documents while adhering to the synchronization requirements, and iv) evaluate the trade-off between time complexity to get the solution and quality of solution by comparing the algorithms solution with exhaustive solution over a set of experiments.