Merging the best of HTTP and P2P

Abstract

The World Wide Web is growing fast. Web content is growing as well. To cope with this trend, server infrastructures must be able to serve a huge amount of traffic. When this cannot happen, service denial is the consequence. Small content publishers are the most affected by this phenomenon. At the same time, BitTorrent is leading the file sharing world, generating a big part of the network traffic. Therefore combining HTTP and BitTorrent is a candidate solution for dealing with phenomena like flashcrowds. But how to merge the HTTP and BitTorrent protocols? How to leverage the P2P network when the only input is the web content URL? This document proposes an approach to support HTTP with the BitTorrent protocol. The architecture of HTTP2P, a tool capable of hybrid download, is described in its details. It is shown that the main problem to face when creating such an hybrid is preventing content pollution attacks. The solution to this problem is the Pollution Prevention algorithm presented in this work. The experiment results show that the achieved performance when combining HTTP and BitTorrent is the best of both protocols: slow start-up delay, improved download speed and server load reduction.