ITR/SI: Adaptive Wide-Area Information Delivery

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The explosive popularity and exponentially increasing scale of the World Wide Web has severely stressed the Internet's content-delivery infrastructure. This stress has begun to expose the inefficiencies and limitations of the Web's traditional client-server architecture. A progression of new mechanisms and alternative architectures have recently appeared, including content delivery networks (CDNs), such as Akamai, and peer-to-peer overlay networks, such as Napster. Despite the rapid deployment and global use of these architectures, however, little is understood about their behavior in many cases. The goals of this research project are threefold. First, the effectiveness of existing Internet content-delivery architectures will be quantitatively analyzed, specifically focusing on (1) cache infrastructure, (2) content-delivery networks, and (3) peer-to-peer networks. Second, based upon these measurements, the design of new or enhanced architectures for Web content delivery will be explored. Third, new designs will be implemented, deployed, and measured. One particular focus will be the design and implementation of adaptive systems that make heavy use of self-measurement and on-line algorithms, e.g., to dynamically optimize request routing, content placement, or the topology of the peer-to-peer overlay network. Overall, the hope is to increase the understanding of content-delivery architectures and to develop new content-delivery mechanisms that greatly improve the behavior of the Internet.