A First Step Towards User Assisted Online Social Networks
Fecha
2010-04-13Resumen
The current Online Social Networks' infrastructure is com-
posed 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 scal-
ability, 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 archi-
tecture 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 in-
formation while reducing the operational and maintenance
costs. We discuss the benefits that this proposal may pro-
duce 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.
Materias
Q Science::Q Science (General)Q Science::QA Mathematics::QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
T Technology::T Technology (General)
T Technology::TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
T Technology::TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering