Multi-way Rendezvous in the Web

John Heidemann and Wenhui Zhao
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Web Rendezvous is the meeting of information publisher and subscriber, allowing the subscriber to create and maintain a list of links (indices) to publishers' pages. Rendezvous is difficult because pages may move and unauthorized publishers may seek to add their pages to the index (spamming). Current rendezvous approaches are work-intensive or restricted to very limited domains. We provide a taxonomy of web rendezvous methods. We identify automated methods which allow a subscriber to maintain an index of many pages with only a fixed amount of effort. Our methods leverage existing web search engines to be robust to page movement, and use encryption to prevent index spamming. We have designed and implemented two different rendezvous methods; we summarize our experience using them, finding that we can securely track index changes in a few days with publisher support, and eventually even without publisher support.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Heidemann98f

John Heidemann and Wenhui Zhao. Multi-way Rendezvous in the Web. Technical Report 98-687, University of Southern California, December, 1998. submitted for publication. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann98f.html>.

@techreport{Heidemann98f,
	author = "John Heidemann and Wenhui Zhao",
	title = "Multi-way Rendezvous in the Web",
	institution = "University of Southern California",
	year = "1998",
	number = "98-687",
	month = "December",
	note = "submitted for publication",
	keywords = "replica selection, http",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann98f.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann98f.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann98f.pdf",
	otherurl = "ftp://usc.edu/pub/csinfo/tech-reports/papers/98-687.ps.Z",
	copyrightholder = "author",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 1998 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.