FeedTree
Introduction
In 2004, as site syndication grew out of relative obscurity into a pervasive Internet movement, feed publishers became concerned over the way in which RSS/Atom data is transferred over the network. Because RSS clients check for news by repeatedly requesting a news feed from its canonical URL—typically every hour, sometimes even more frequently—the bandwidth requirements of hosting an RSS feed may potentially be disproportionately large (as compared with other Web resources of similar size). At the same time, end users who wish to see more timely news (that is, users wanting shorter delays between updates) have every incentive to exacerbate the network stress on publishers by polling feeds even more frequently.
We have previously identified this pair of opposed demands (viz., bandwidth reduction for publishers; timeliness for users) in the FeedTree paper (see below). In that work we further outlined our design for FeedTree, a system which replaces the polling component of news feeds with peer-to-peer multicast. The design, based on the Scribe group communication system, offers timely and efficient delivery of micronews by sharing the burden of delivery among cooperating peers in the network. Messages in the FeedTree system may optionally be cryptographically signed by the publisher to defend against spoofed content from malicious nodes.
Since then, we have developed this design into a working software system. Current users of news feeds can download the FeedTreeProxy to instantly “upgrade” their existing feed readers to be a part of the FeedTree network. Existing RSS feeds will be integrated on-the-fly into the multicast system without any extra effort by publishers.
Publishers can, optionally, install the FeedTreePublisher to provide instantaneous, cryptographically signed updates to FeedTree users.
Poster
New: The FeedTreePoster is now available (in PDF and JPEG formats).
Further reading: FeedTree paper (IPTPS05)
D. Sandler, A. Mislove, A. Post, and P. Druschel. FeedTree: Sharing micronews with peer-to-peer event notification. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'05), Ithaca, NY, Feburary 2005.
Abstract
Syndication of micronews, frequently-updated content on the Web, is currently accomplished with RSS feeds and client applications that poll those feeds. However, providers of RSS content have recently become concerned about the escalating bandwidth demand of RSS readers. Current efforts to address this problem by optimizing the polling behavior of clients sacrifice timeliness without fundamentally improving the scalability of the system. In this paper, we argue for a micronews distribution system called FeedTree, which uses a peer-to-peer overlay network to distribute RSS feed data to subscribers promptly and efficiently. Peers in the network share the bandwidth costs, which reduces the load on the provider, and updated content is delivered to clients as soon as it is available.