On reliable and scalable peer-to-peer Web document sharing

We propose a peer-to-peer Web document sharing technique, called a "browser-aware proxy server". In this design, a proxy server connecting to a group of networked clients maintains an index file of data objects of all the clients' browser caches. If a user request misses in its local browser cache and the proxy cache, the browser-aware proxy server searches the index file, attempting to find it in another client's browser cache before sending the request to an upper-level proxy or to the Web server. If such a hit is found in a client, this client directly forwards the data object to the requesting client, or the proxy server fetches the data object from this client and then forwards it to the requesting client. Trace-driven simulations show that the amount of sharable data in browser caches is significant and can be utilized for peer-to-peer document sharing to improve Web caching performance and scalability. We also address the issues of data integrity and communication anonymity in order to build a reliable browser-aware proxy server.