A market-based architecture for management of geographically dispersed, replicated Web servers

Abstract

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.fatively controlled with cost functions even when the clients are noncooperative.