NoCDN: scalable content delivery without a middleman

Abstract

Today's websites achieve scalability by either deploying their own platforms with sufficient spare capacity or signing up for services from a content delivery network (CDN). This paper investigates another alternative, where a website directly recruits Internet users to contribute their resources to help deliver the site's content. We show that this alternative, which we call NoCDN, can be implemented securely, transparently to the users accessing the site, and without changes to the content itself.