UsenetDHT: A Low-Overhead Design for Usenet

Usenet is a popular distributed messaging and file sharing service: servers in Usenet flood articles over an overlay network to fully replicate articles across all servers. However, replication of Usenet's full content requires that each server pay the cost of receiving (and storing) over 1 Tbyte/day. This paper presents the design and implementation of UsenetDHT, a Usenet system that allows a set of cooperating sites to keep a shared, distributed copy of Usenet articles. UsenetDHT consists of client-facing Usenet NNTP front-ends and a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) that provides shared storage of articles across the wide area. This design allows participating sites to partition the storage burden, rather than replicating all Usenet articles at all sites.