Parallel-Access for Mirror Sites in the Internet

— Popular documents are frequently mirrored on multiple sites in an effort to share the load and reduce clients’ retrieval latencies. However, choosing the best mirror site is a non-trivial task and a bad choice may give an poor performance. We propose a scheme in which clients access multiple mirror sites in parallel to speedup document downloads while eliminatingthe problem of server selection. In our scheme, clients connect to mirror sites using unicast TCP and dynamically request different pieces of a document from different sites, thus, adapting to changing network/server conditions. A dynamic parallel-access can be easily implemented in the current Internet, and does not require any modifications at the mirror sites. Using dynamic parallel-access all clients experience dramatic speedups in downloading documents, and the load is shared among servers without the need for a server selection mechanism. Even in a situation where clients are connected through modem lines, dynamic ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Pablo Rodriguez, Andreas Kirpal, Ernst Biersack
• Keywords: Communications, Dynamic Parallel-access, INFOCOM 2000, Mirror Sites, Multiple Mirror Sites