BufferBank: A distributed cache infrastructure for peer-to-peer application

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems generate a major fraction of the current Internet traffic which significantly increase the load on ISP networks. To mitigate these negative impacts, many previous works in the literature have proposed caching of P2P traffic. But very few have considered designing a distributed caching infrastructure in the edge network. This paper demonstrates that a distributed caching infrastructure is more suitable than traditional proxy cache servers which cache data in disk, and it is viable to use the memory of users in the edge network as the cache space. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a distributed network cache infrastructure for P2P application, called BufferBank. BufferBank provides a number of application interfaces for P2P applications to make full use of the cache space. Three-level mapping is introduced and elaborated to improve the reliability and security of this distributed cache mechanism. Our measurement results suggest that BufferBank can decrease the data obtaining delay, compared with traditional P2P cache server based on disk.