Distributed cooperative Web servers

Traditional techniques for a distributed web server design rely on manipula tion of central resources, such as routers or DNS services, to distribute r equests designated for a single IP address to multiple web servers. The goa l of the distributed cooperative Web server (DCWS) system development is to explore application-level techniques for distributing web content. We achi eve this by dynamically manipulating the hyperlinks stored within the web d ocuments themselves. The DCWS system effectively eliminates the bottleneck of centralized resources, while balancing the load among distributed web se rvers. DCWS servers may be located in different networks, or even different continents and still balance load effectively. DCWS system design is fully compatible with existing HTTP protocol semantics and existing web client s oftware products. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights re served.