pWeb: A distributed web hosting infrastructure

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Centralized web hosting is not sufficient for today's Web, which is intensively used for hosting voluminous multimedia content. Centralized technology has several inherent deficiencies, including: scalability issues; a single point of failure; administrative overhead; and hosting expenses. These problems can be addressed by distributing the websites and voluminous web contents over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of consumer devices with network and storage capabilities. As peers will be hosting each website (or a part of it) collaboratively, there would be no limit on concurrent access to a website, no single point of failure, and a reduced dependency on expensive high-end web servers. This would also reduce administration overhead and power consumption at server farms. P2P Web hosting is challenging due to two reasons: firstly, uptime of a peer is much shorter compared to a web server, and secondly, a shared content frequently changes location in a P2P network, in contrast to stationary websites. These dynamic behaviors can raise the following research challenges, which we aim to address: (a) Naming: the Web naming scheme, Uniform Resource Locators (URL), is not suitable for P2P environment as URLs are location dependent and URL assignment require central naming authority; (b) Indexing and searching: robust and efficient indexing is essential for tracking continuously changing peers' and contents' locations; (c) Availability: to ensure 24/7 availability of websites in P2P environment we propose a time-based replication strategy with minimal replication overhead; (d) Peer architecture: we propose a blueprint for devising a lightweight web hosting architecture for regular peers, running on low-end, Internet-ready home-networking devices with minimal administration requirements. The P2P Web hosting framework presented in this proposal is novel and comprehensive. We not only expect to devise innovative solutions for the above research issues, but believe that these findings will open new possibilities for continuing research within academia. Moreover, the P2P client implementation to be produced within this project can be adopted by the Canadian IT industry as a basis for bringing P2P Web hosting into reality.