P-CDN: Extending access control capabilities of P2P systems to provide CDN services

New important emerging business paradigms, such as ldquoservice virtualizationrdquo can be made easy and convenient by the use of P2P systems. In these paradigms, often the owners of the services are different (and independent) from the owners of the resources used to offer such services. In comparison to centralized servers, P2P systems can conveniently offer higher availability and more bandwidth as they harness the computing and network resources of thousands of hosts in a decentralized fashion. Despite these useful features and their success in the research community, P2P systems are still not very popular in the business world. The main reason for such a skepticism is their lack of proper security. In this paper, we address this issue by motivating and explaining the benefits of adding access control in P2P systems to make them more suitable and flexible as a technical platform for providing third party services. We propose an architecture augmented with access control mechanisms to enable content delivery on a P2P system. The proposed architecture is shaped according to CDN requirements. We have also tested the feasibility of our approach with a prototype implementation and the preliminary results show that our system can scale well also in the presence of very large number of policies.