On Reliable and Scalable Peer-to-Peer Web Document Sharing

Li Xiao, Xiaodong Zhang, and Zhichen Xu 
 
Proceedings of 2002 International Parallel and Distributed 
Processing Symposium, (IPDPS'02), Fort Lauderdale, Florida, April 15-19, 2002.

Abstract

We propose a peer-to-peer Web document sharing technique,
called ``Browsers-Aware Proxy Server". In this design, a proxy server
connecting to a group of networked clients maintains an
index file of data objects of all clients' browser caches.
If a user request misses in its local browser cache and
the proxy cache, the browsers-aware proxy server will search
the index file attempting to find it in another client's
browser cache before sending the request to an upper level
proxy or the web server. If such a hit is found in a
client, this client will directly forward the data object
to the requesting client; or the proxy server load the data
object from this client and then store it to the requesting
client. Our trace-driven simulations show that the amount of sharable
data in browser caches is significant and can be utilized for
peer-to-peer document sharing to improve Web caching performance and
scalability. We also consider the issues of data integrity and
communication anonymity in order to build a reliable browsers-aware 
proxy server.