SCOPE: Synergistic Content Distribution and Peer-to-Peer Networks

Distributing content on the Internet is an important economic, educational, social, and cultural endeavor. To this end, there have been proposals to use traditional server-based content distribution networks (CDNs) to replicate and distribute web and multimedia content of big content producers, such as news websites, or big businesses, such as online shopping websites, etc., to millions of Internet users. This approach places a large number of content servers at strategic locations on the Internet, incurring a very large deployment and operating cost. Therefore, it is available only to some wealthy companies/organizations. Individual users and small content publishers may rely on a more economical content dissemination approach based on recent peer-to-peer technology to distribute their own content. Nevertheless, it is the ephemeral and the limited resources nature of peer-to-peer networks that hinder a wide spread adoption of peer-to-peer technology as a reliable content distribution solution. It is, therefore, important that a new generation of cost-effective and reliable content distribution framework be proposed and investigated. Building on the successes and failures of previous content distribution approaches, the proposed research’s goal is to design and evaluate a Synergistic Content Distribution and Peer-to-Peer Networks (SCOPE). SCOPE leverages the reliability and the resourcefulness of traditional server-based CDNs while tapping on the economical and dynamic resources of peers.