E-representative: a scalability scheme for e-commerce

In order to meet the quality of service demanded by a growing number of online customers, e-commerce services need to use scalability techniques. This paper introduces the concept of e-commerce representatives, a means of scaling the performance of e-commerce services. E-representatives are programs that execute on a cache server or at nearby machines. E-representatives can be implemented using redirection, a mechanism available in popular cache servers. Using analytical and simulation models, we show the potential performance gains obtained by e-commerce sites that distribute their services among e-representatives and contribute to reduce bandwidth consumption and network latency.