Content distribution on the Internet in general and on the Web in particular has gone through several evolutions and changes over the last 15 years. Starting from the simple architecture with web servers and browsers, the content distribution has seen changes through proxies, caches, mirroring, and content distribution networks. Other distribution paradigms, such as publish/subscribe, peer-to-peer, and more recently information-centric networks have been widely studied in research and some of them, most notably peer-to-peer, been deployed widely. In this seminar, we will take a look at the evolution of content distribution in order to understand the basic technological solutions, their advantages and disadvantages, and finally get a better understanding of what the future holds for content distribution.

Possible seminar topics will revolve around the following areas:

• Web caching
• Cache replacement algorithms
• Collaborative caching
• Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• Peer-to-peer content distribution
• Publish/subscribe
• Information-centric networks
• Mobile content distribution and sharing
• Naming of content
• Content popularity (a.k.a. why caching works)