| Sponsor |
Ellen Zegura ewz@cc.gatech.edu 216 GCATT |
| Area | Networking |
Problem
Server replication is one technique to improve scalability of
a networked service. Server replication involves placing identical
content servers ("mirrors") in geographically distributed locations
in the Internet. Clients are directed to mirrors in an attempt
to distribute load and improve client performance. A number of
interesting research problems are suggested by a server replication
approach. To help gain insight into the issue of performance across
mirror servers, a group at CMU made a large number of measurements
to mirrors (see
application-aware anycast webpage).
A paper describing their work can be found on the webpage, along
with the raw data.
This project consists of obtaining the CMU datasets and investigating additional interesting questions (beyond those presented in the Infocom'99 paper). The dataset is very rich, and the Infocom paper had limited space to present results. There are quite a few interesting additional questions to ask. For example, are there a few servers that are generally preferred by nearly all clients? Or do client preferences tend to balance load across the servers? Once you understand the data, you should propose some of your own questions to examine.
Preparation for the project includes reading the Infocom'99 paper, and getting the data files. Please contact me to discuss ideas on other interesting information to extract from the data.