Open Content Network
Home	FAQ	Download	Publish	Technical

	Content-Addressable Web Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), such as Akamai, have shown that significant improvements can be made in throughput, latency, and scalability when content is distributed throughout the network and delivered from the edge. Likewise, peer-to-peer systems such as Napster and Gnutella have shown that normal desktop PCs can serve up enormous amounts of content with zero administration. And more recently, systems like Swarmcast have been introduced that combine the CDN and peer-to-peer concepts to gain the benefits of both. The goal of the Content-Addressable Web is to enable these advanced content location and distribution services with standard web servers, caches, and browsers. The main benefits of the Content-Addressable Web are: Throughput - Browsers will be able to download content from multiple sources in parallel [figure 1] Bandwidth Savings - Browsers will automatically discover and select the closest mirror for a piece of content. Fault Tolerance - Even if a site goes down in the middle of a download, browsers will automatically locate another mirror and continue downloading. Scalability - Any number of machines may be added to the network, creating a CDN ad hoc, with very little administration [figure 2]. Security - Browsers will be able to safely download content from untrusted mirrors without risk of corruption or viruses. The full paper describing the "HTTP Extensions for a Content-Addressable Web" is available here.		Downloading from Multiple Sources in Parallel Creating a CDN ad hoc with Multi-Source Downloads