Improving access to large volumes of online data

The Internet has recently become the medium of interaction with large volumes of data. Enterprises in the public and private sectors made their databases available over the Internet. Working with such large volumes of online data is a challenging task. For efficient access to large data from remote locations we introduced APPOINT (an Approach for Peer-to-Peer Offloading the INTernet). In APPOINT, active clients of a client-server architecture act on the server's behalf and communicate with each other to transfer large volumes of online data more efficiently. In essence, a server is enabled to appoint alternatives and create a scalable collaborative virtual mirror from the active clients. Multiple parameters such as availability of clients and bandwidth information on clients are considered to decide on how to best forward a download request. APPOINT is built as an add-on to existing client-server systems. A library of functions, with a simple application programming interface (API) that can be used within an existing client-server system to improve the service, is developed. Our experimental findings show that APPOINT can dramatically improve the performance of existing client-server based database systems.