An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems

The paper analyzes four different content delivery systems from the arena of client-server oriented world-wide web, content delivery networks and peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The important features of peer-to-peer systems are symmetry among the peers (since they behave as both servers and clients) and scalability up to as many as millions of machines. Dynamic membership, wide-area network and heterogeneity of the participating systems in terms of their bandwidth, connectivity and performance are some of the distinguishing characteristics of peer-topeer systems. Such systems tend to be application specific. Some peer-to-peer systems may have a hierarchy among the members, for instance some peers in Kazaa are supernodes and maintain indexes for the content available at peers in the nearby neighborhood.