WebCloud: Recruiting Social Network Users to Assist in Content Distribution

Today, the data exchanged over online social networks (OSNs) represents a significant fraction of Internet traffic. However, OSN content is different from more traditional web content, as it is more likely to be generated at the edge of the network, to be exchanged within a local geographic region, and to possess a more even popularity distribution with fewer popular objects. Unfortunately, most OSNs still use largely centralized approaches to distribute content (e.g., CDNs and web caches), resulting in lower performance due to the different workload. In this paper, we take a first step towards addressing this situation by proposing Web Cloud, a content distribution system for OSNs that works by repurposing client web browsers to help serve content to others. When a user browses content, Web Cloud tries to serve the request from one of that user's friends' browsers, instead of from the OSN directly. Unlike other systems, Web Cloud works with existing browsers and does not require any plug-ins, and therefore can be directly applied to today's OSNs. We demonstrate the practicality of Web Cloud with micro benchmarks, simulations of a Facebook deployment, a real-world deployment, and evaluations of a proof-of-concept iOS app.