APPOINT: an Approach for Peer-to-Peer Offloading the INTernet

The Internet has recently become the medium of interaction with large volumes of online data. Enterprises in the public and private sectors made their data archives available over the Internet. Working with such large volumes of online data is a challenging task. APPOINT (an Approach for Peer-to-Peer Offloading the INTernet), a centralized peer-to-peer approach that helps users of the Internet transfer large volumes of online data efficiently, is introduced with this paper. In APPOINT, active clients of a client-server architecture act on the server's behalf and communicate with each other to decrease network latency, improve service bandwidth, and resolve server congestions. In essence, a server is enabled to appoint alternatives when needed and create a scalable collaborative virtual mirror from the active clients. Multiple parameters such as locality and availability to decide on how to best forward a download request are considered. The problems that can arise in symmetric upload requests are also addressed. APPOINT is an ongoing project and it is being built as an add-on to existing client-server systems. A library of functions, with a simple application programming interface (API) that can be used within an existing client-server system to improve the service, is currently being developed.