A Lightweight, Robust P2P System to Handle Flash Crowds

Angelos Stavrou, Dan Rubenstein, Sambit Sahu
Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'02)

Overview

PROOFS is a peer-to-peer approach to maintain a website's availability in the presence of a flash crowd. PROOFS comprises of two components. One component is responsible for constructing and maintaining the overlay network. The second component is responsible for retrieving objects.

To join the network a node first contacts a bootstrap server to obtain a list of initial neighbors. Peers continuously perform a shuffle operation with their neighbors. Neighbors performing a shuffle operation exchange a random subset of their neighbors with each other.

When a peer wants to retrieve an object for which it has not a local copy, it formulates a query and forwards the query to a random subset of neighbors. A peer receiving a query first checks if it has a local copy of the object, if so the object is returned directly to the peer initiating the query. If the peer has not a local copy it decrements the TTL of the query and forwards the request to a random subset of its neighbors.