A market-based architecture for management of geographically dispersed, replicated Web servers

Distributed Web sites require allocation mechanisms to dispatch request in a scalable and controllable manner among a set of replicated servers. Unlike most existing approaches, we propose a technique that pushes the allocation functionality onto the client and argue that this approach scales well and may result in increased performance in many cases. Building on theoretical work based on game theory, we show that the usage of individual replicas can be effectively controlled with cost functions even when the clients are noncooperative. We present the design and implementation of WebSeAl, our prototype system realizing these techniques, and present experiment results. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.