Design of Cooperative Load Distribution for Addressing Flash Crowds Using P2P File Sharing Network

The flash crowd is a network phenomenon where a network or host suddenly receives a lot of traffic. It is a serious problem for web servers because it causes the websites temporarily unavailable. However, conventional load distribution methods could not address this problem effectively by reason of that it needs a reliable projection for a peak of loads. Preparing enough infrastructures for addressing flash crowds, it is especially difficult for the administrators such as persons, not-for-profit organizations, and SOHO business operators. In many cases, these websites are not protected from flash crowds. In this paper, we propose a load distribution method for addressing flash crowds effectively by cooperating with other web servers and exchanging data in a P2P file sharing network. In our approach, web servers lent their idle resources each other, and increase the number of replicas automatically according to high demand by using P2P file sharing networks.