A paracasting model for concurrent access to replicated Internet content

In this paper, we develop a model to study how to effectively download a document from a set of replicated servers. We propose a generalized application-layer anycasting protocol, known as paracasting, to advocate concurrent access of a subset of replicated servers to cooperatively satisfy a client's request. Each participating server satisfies the request in part by transmitting a subset of the requested file to the client. The client can recover the complete file when different parts of the file sent from the participating servers are received. This model allows us to estimate the average time to download a file from the set of homogeneous replicated servers, and the request blocking probability when each server can accept and serve a finite number of concurrent requests. Our results show that the file download time drops when a request is served concurrently by a larger number of homogeneous replicated servers, although the performance improvement quickly saturates when the number of servers increases. If the total number of requests that a server can handle simultaneously is finite, the request blocking probability increases with the number of replicated servers used to serve a request concurrently. Therefore, paracasting is effective when a small number of servers, say, up to four, are used to serve a request concurrently.