Abstract

Content Delivery Networks reduce latency for Web services by locating Web content as close to users as possible. However, this approach requires establishing and maintaining an expansive global infrastructure. The limits of such infrastructure, together with poor last-mile latencies in many parts of the World, imply that for many users, latency to even their nearest CDN nodes remains high. We thus explore the converse model for Web page delivery: that of users establishing their presence globally to form a Content Gathering Network, and leveraging these points of presence to obtain faster Web page load times. This approach rests on a simple, but crucial observation: most Web services are consolidated within a small number of cloud data centers. We show that orchestrating proxies at these data centers, coupled with the use of simple transport optimizations, can reduce page load times by more than 50% for users distant from Web servers. This design is immediately deployable, without any changes to Internet infrastructure or at Web servers, at a cost of less than $1 per user per month. Further, our analysis suggests that it can nearly match the performance of a well-optimized CDN , without needing similarly extensive infrastructure.