A market-based architecture for management of geographically dispersed, replicated Web servers
Mehmet Karaul, Yannis A. Korilis, Ariel Orda · 1998
Many popular Web sites employ a set geographically dispersed, replicated servers to address the issue of overloaded servers and network congestion.Such distributed Web sites require allocation mechanisms to dispatch request in a way such that any desired load distribution can be enforced.Unlike most traditional approadms, we propose a technique which pushes the allocation functionality onto the client.We argue that this approach scales well aud may rsuit in increased performance in many cases.Building on theoretical work based on game theory, we show that the usage of individual replicas cau be ef.fativelycontrolled with cost functions even when the clients are noncooperative.We present the design aud implementation of WehSeAl, our prototype system rerdiz-bg these techniques.WebSeAl does not require any changes to exist-mg client and server code, cotiorma to HTTP standards, and does not generate any control messages.Experiment results indicate that WebSeAl improves periiorrnance while imposing little overhead.