Project description
We have recently proposed a semi-decentralized collaborative hosting system Wikipedia. In this system, individuals willing to help host Wikipedia join their computer to an overlay network of nodes, which handles a significant part of Wikipedia's workload, resulting in reduced operational cost for Wikipedia.
The collaborative overlay hosts replicas of the most popular Wikipedia pages and files (e.g., images, videos, etc.) in order to offload the centrally managed Wikipedia infrastructure. Hosting wiki pages and multimedia file differs in that wiki pages can be (and are) updated at any time by any user, while multimedia files are rarely or never updated (even though it is possible under Wikipedia). Our current architecture uses a replication policy that is constrained by the need to be able to efficiently propagate updates to all replicas of any object. However, if we drop the assumption that multimedia files are mutable, we can have more flexibility when defining replication policies for them.
The purpose of this project is to propose and evaluate new replication policies for multimedia files under our collaborative Wikipedia hosting system under the assumption that these files are read only. The goal of these new policies is to better distribute the load on the collaborative overlay so that end users enjoy better performance and the centrally managed Wikipedia infrastructure enjoys further reduction of the load it needs to handle.
Prerequisites
The project will be developed under a simulation environment written in C. Therefore, proficiency in this programming language is required.
References