Improved parallel access to multiple Internet mirror servers

Accessing multiple mirror sites in parallel is a novel approach to efficient downloading of large files from the Internet. Establishing multiple connections simultaneously with mirror servers carrying replicas of the required data in geographically distributed locations provides resilience against packet losses and can significantly reduce download times. Typically, the packets are randomly permuted at each mirror site to reduce the probability of packet duplication at the receivers. In this paper, we present an improvement to this approach that staggers the packets at each mirror site. OPNET is employed to study system performance. The results show that staggering significantly reduces packet duplication and improves completion time