Peer-to-peer collaboration in content delivery networks

Abstract

A low-cost collaboration architecture for web content distribution, that aims to improve all stakeholder's interests, is presented. A peer-to-peer (P2P) contribution among the end users layer is suggested, in order to increase download rates and reduce server traffic and resource usage. In addition, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) concerns are also considered, with an ISP-aware connection strategy in the P2P protocol. Collaboration among publisher's web server resources is also proposed, in order to improve the CDN architecture performance. All the elements of this architecture have been developed and have been successfully tested in 5 different scenarios, within the PlanetLab large-scale overlay network testbed. Results show that download speed increases after implementing P2P collaboration on a content delivery scenario, with a strong reduction of data transferred via HTTP servers. The ISP-aware approach reduces inter-ISP traffic, with an increase of download speeds. This implementation is fairer as the content popularity grows because end-users extreme download rates tend to approach to the average.