Hi,
I am Yeongjin Jang, a Ph.D. Student at Georgia Tech.
In our lab (SSLab,
https://sslab.gtisc.gatech.edu/),
we are working on a project called B2BWiki,
which enables users to share the contents of Wikipedia through WebRTC
(peer-to-peer sharing).
Website is at here:
http://b2bwiki.cc.gatech.edu/
The project aims to help Wikipedia by donating computing resources
from the community; users can donate their traffic (by P2P communication)
and storage (indexedDB) to reduce the load of Wikipedia servers.
For larger organizations, e.g. schools or companies that
have many local users, they can donate a mirror server
similar to GNU FTP servers, which can bootstrap peer sharing.
Potential benefits that we think of are following.
1) Users can easily donate their resources to the community.
Just visit the website.
2) Users can get performance benefit if a page is loaded from
multiple local peers / local mirror (page load time got faster!).
3) Wikipedia can reduce its server workload, network traffic, etc.
4) Local network operators can reduce network traffic transit
(e.g. cost that is caused by delivering the traffic to the outside).
While we are working on enhancing the implementation,
we would like to ask the opinions from actual developers of Wikipedia.
For example, we want to know whether our direction is correct or not
(will it actually reduce the load?), or if there are some other concerns
that we missed, that can potentially prevent this system from
working as intended. We really want to do somewhat meaningful work
that actually helps run Wikipedia!
Please feel free to give as any suggestions, comments, etc.
If you want to express your opinion privately,
please contact sslab(a)cc.gatech.edu.
Thanks,
--- Appendix ---
I added some detailed information about B2BWiki in the following.
# Accessing data
When accessing a page on B2BWiki, the browser will query peers first.
1) If there exist peers that hold the contents, peer to peer download happens.
2) otherwise, if there is no peer, client will download the content
from the mirror server.
3) If mirror server does not have the content, it downloads from
Wikipedia server (1 access per first download, and update).
# Peer lookup
To enable content lookup for peers,
we manage a lookup server that holds a page_name-to-peer map.
A client (a user's browser) can query the list of peers that
currently hold the content, and select the peer by its freshness
(has hash/timestamp of the content,
has top 2 octet of IP address
(figuring out whether it is local peer or not), etc.
# Update, and integrity check
Mirror server updates its content per each day
(can be configured to update per each hour, etc).
Update check is done by using If-Modified-Since header from Wikipedia server.
On retrieving the content from Wikipedia, the mirror server stamps a timestamp
and sha1 checksum, to ensure the freshness of data and its integrity.
When clients lookup and download the content from the peers,
client will compare the sha1 checksum of data
with the checksum from lookup server.
In this settings, users can get older data
(they can configure how to tolerate the freshness of data,
e.g. 1day older, 3day, 1 week older, etc.), and
the integrity is guaranteed by mirror/lookup server.
More detailed information can be obtained from the following website.
http://goo.gl/pSNrjR
(URL redirects to SSLab@gatech website)
Please feel free to give as any suggestions, comments, etc.
Thanks,
--
Yeongjin Jang