ABSTRACT

This proposal is developing a set of technologies to create federated content distribution utilities that support the simultaneous delivery of a wide variety of content to overlapping sets of clients with statistical quality of service assurances. The federated content distribution infrastructure will: i) simultaneously meet the performance demands of high-bandwidth and low-latency content delivery and the resource allocation constraints of constituent service providers; ii) weather a variety of attacks both from the outside and from self-interested or malicious nodes directly participating in the protocol; iii) incorporate basic algorithms for distributing content under a wide variety of dynamic network conditions. Because the infrastructure is shared by a variety of applications and hosted by a number of mutually distrustful administrative domains, the system must provide mechanisms that both adjudicate among competing applications and allow each administrative domain to maintain its own resource allocation policies.

If successful this research will effect a qualitative shift in: i) the way in which data is distributed across the Internet; ii) basic algorithms for determining optimal data distribution strategies across arbitrary data meshes; iii) the levels of reliability
and performance that can be achieved in critical nation-wide or global-scale event notification systems (e.g., the air-traffic control system); and iv) the ability of resource-poor providers to harness federated distribution utilities to publish urgent content such as Internet worm or virus signatures on a global scale.

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