Recent years have seen several earnest initiatives from both academic researchers as well as open source communities to implement and deploy decentralized online social networks (DOSNs). The primary motivations for DOSNs are privacy and autonomy from big brotherly service providers. The promise of decentralization is complete freedom for end-users from any service providers both in terms of keeping privacy about content and communication, and also from any form of censorship. However decentralization introduces many challenges. One of the principal problems is to guarantee availability of data even when the data owner is not online, so that others can access the said data even when a node is offline or down. In this paper, we argue that a pragmatic design needs to explicitly allow for and leverage on system heterogeneity, and provide incentives for the resource rich participants in the system to contribute such resources. To that end we introduce SuperNova - a super-peer based DOSN architecture. While proposing the SuperNova architecture, we envision a dynamic system driven by incentives and reputation, however, investigation of such incentives and reputation, and its effect on determining peer behaviors is a subject for our future study. In this paper we instead investigate the efficacy of a super-peer based system at any time point (a snap-shot of the envisioned dynamic system), that is to say, we try to quantify the performance of SuperNova system given any (fixed) mix of peer population and strategies.
Another recent approach looks at using user resources to help scale centralized OSNs @cite_12 by using user resources to distribute large files among friends, but in such a scenario, the users' role is more that of a P2P content distribution network, and the privacy and autonomy issues of centralized OSNs persist.
@cite_12
2040908833
The current Online Social Networks' infrastructure is composed by thousands of servers distributed across data-centers spread over several geographical locations. These servers store all the users' information (profile, contacts, contents, etc). Such an infrastructure incurs high operational and maintenance costs. Furthermore, this may threaten the scalability, the reliability, the availability and the privacy of the offered service. On the other hand this centralized approach gives to the OSN provider full control over a huge amount of valuable information. This information constitutes the basis of the OSN provider's business. Most of the storage capacity is dedicated to store the user's content (e.g. photos, videos, etc). We believe that OSN provider does not have strong incentive to dedicate a large part of its infrastructure to store majority part of this content. In this position paper we introduce the concept of user assisted Online Social Network (uaOSN). This novel architecture seeks to distribute the storage load associated to the content (e.g. photos, videos, etc) among the OSN's users. Thus the OSN provider keeps the control on the relevant information while reducing the operational and maintenance costs. We discuss the benefits that this proposal may produce for both, the OSN provider and the users. We also discuss the technical aspects to be considered and compare this solution to other distributed approaches.