Bistro

Abstract

Hot spots are a major obstacle to achieving scalability in the Internet. At the application layer, hot spots are usually caused by either (a) high demand for some data or (b) high demand for a certain service. This high demand for data or services, is typically the result of a real-life event involving availability of new data or approaching deadlines; therefore, relief of these hot spots may improve quality of life. At the application layer, hot spot problems have traditionally been dealt with using some combination of (1) increasing capacity; (2) spreading the load over time, space, or both; and (3) changing the workload.We note that the classes of solutions stated above have been studied mostly in the context of applications using the following types of communication (a) one-to-many, (b) many-to-many, and (c) one-to-one. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no existing work on making applications using many-to-one communication scalable and efficient (existing solutions, such as web based submissions, simply use many independent one-to-one transfers). This corresponds to an important class of applications, whose examples include the various upload applications such as submission of income tax forms, conference paper submission, proposal submission through the NSF FastLane system, homework and project submissions in distance education, voting in digital democracy applications, voting in interactive television, and many more. Consequently, the main focus of this paper is scalable infrastructure design for relief of hot spots in wide-area upload applications .The main contributions of this paper are as follows. We state (a) a new problem, specifically, the many-to-one communication, or upload, problem as well as (b) the (currently) fundamental obstacles to building scalable wide-area upload applications. We also propose a general framework, which we term the Bistro system, for a class of solutions to the upload problem. In addition, we suggest a number of open research problems, within this framework, throughout the paper.