Enhancing ICP with P2P technology: Cost, availability, and reconfiguration

Abstract

Traditional Web cache servers based on HTTP and ICP infrastructure tend to have higher hardware and management cost, have difficulty in availability, automatic and dynamic reconfiguration, and may have slow links to some users. We find that peer-to-peer technology can help solve these problems. The peer cache service (PCS) we proposed here leverages each peer's local cache, similar access patterns, fully distributed coordination, and fast communication channels to enhance response time, scale of cacheable objects, and availability. Moreover, incorporating goals and strategies such as making the protocol lightweight and mutually compatible with existing cache infrastructure, supporting mobile devices, undertaking dynamic three-level caching, and exchanging cache meta-information further improve the effectiveness and differentiate our work from other similar-at-first-glance P2P Web cache systems.