Framework for a Decentralized Web

Abstract

Over the past decade, we have witnessed the Internet becoming increasingly centralized in the hands of a small number of giant technology firms, that control many of the most popular applications and the content they host on their platforms. In addition, in the majority of instances today, access to the Internet is usually provided through local internet service providers (ISPs) in each country. Governments in different jurisdictions can exert pressure on these technology firms and ISPs to enforce restrictions on Internet usage by their citizens, such as the blocking access to certain sites and/or content. In this paper, we present a promising new approach to circumventing some of these issues. Our decentralized web (DWeb) proposal makes use of a mesh network to connect community based routers. In addition, objects on the DWeb are indexed using blockchain technology, which allows for secure storage of immutable object references, and integrity checking of the data being served to users. Our DWeb design is also capable of operating during network partitions, and is able to quickly re-synchronize with the larger network once connectivity has been restored. The proposed concept is simulated using ns-3, Multichain and Docker technologies. The performance of the system is analysed for different cache replacement strategies with a varying number of gateway nodes. The Popularity-based cache replacement algorithm outperforms the other studied strategies, which show it is the best-suited strategy for the DWeb architecture. In summary, DWeb solves issues like data integrity, centralization and controlled access to the Internet, and the overall framework exhibits fair performance in the studied simulated environment.