Networking for Multimedia Tech Topic #01: Content Delivery Networks

Although this paper is clearly more appropriate for the USENIX Internet Technologies and Systems symposium, it was instead submitted and accepted to the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. The assumption here being that the issue is simply one of timing, as the paper was published in 2002 and USITS is held only during odd-numbered years. Napster had already come, hit its peak, and gone, but P2P file-sharing networks were still relatively hot, at least enough so that a paper consisting mostly of taking traces garnered significant interest. As much as the authors at the time may have said to themselves, “ah, I remember Napster”, today the comparable sentiment is “ah, I remember Kazaa”. But it is doubtful that a similar paper that replaced Kazaa with Bit Torrent would be accepted today.