Reconfigurable Metric-Driven Peer-to-Peer Object Serving
Harvey Vrsalovic

ECE Dept., Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
Hamburg Hall 2201, 4800 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh PA 15232 U.S.A
+1 412 268 6480
harveyv@ece.cmu.edu


 
ABSTRACT

Common object servers such as HTTP or FTP serve content from a static
location, or at most a fixed set of static locations (e.g. clusters.)
Clients who access these services are constrained to use relatively
fixed links to the servers.  As a result, a set of clients may
experience poor access latencies and transfer rates for a given server
/ set of objects.  A possible solution to provide better service to a
given set of clients is to relocate the requested object(s) to a
server, which is "logically" closer to the clients requesting the
objects.  This "logical distance" is computed using a set of link
metrics, computed at interactively at run time between the clients and
servers.  A set of server nodes is deployed as a peer-to-peer system,
with objects distributed among the nodes.  The goal of the system is
to continually move objects within the set of peer nodes to provide
the best overall (aggregate) service to each client.  The system
attempts to answer the question of whether such an overlay network can
show access latency improvement over existing client-server systems.
This initial research into the area has yielded some results which
suggest that a real world implementation of this concept might yield
an improvement over existing static, client-server systems.