Abstract
Peer-to-peer Internet applications have recently attracted much attention. Peer-to-peer systems are different from traditional server-client systems. In peer-to-peer systems, every peer shares its resources with other peers. A peer can be a server at some time and a client at other time. In this thesis, we build a web server on top of a peer-to-peer infrastructure. The resultant system, called Sniper, can support a highly-available, load-sharing, user-administrable web server. In the Sniper system, every peer shares its disk space to form a large logical web space on the Internet. There is no system administrator in the system. Every content publisher is also the administrator of his own web contents. We describe how requests and replicas can be routed among the peers following a peer-to-peer paradigm. We propose a chain replica algorithm to achieve high availability. With the algorithm, the Sniper system can always maintain a constant number of replicas. We also extend the routing algorithm to distribute the requests to the replicas for load sharing. Performance of Sniper is finally evaluated through simulation.