Object Distribution Networks for World-wide Document Circulation

This paper presents an Object Distribution System (ODS), a distributed system inspired by the ultra-large scale distribution models used in everyday life (e.g. food or newspapers distribution chains). Beyond traditional mechanisms of approaching information to readers (e.g. caching and mirroring), this system enables the publication, classification and subscription to volumes of objects (e.g. documents, events). Authors submit their contents to publication agents. Classification authorities provide classification schemes to classify objects. Readers subscribe to topics or authors, and retrieve contents from their local delivery agent (like a kiosk or library, with local copies of objects). Object distribution is an independent process where objects circulate asynchronously among distribution agents. ODS is designed to perform specially well in an increasingly populated, widespread and complex Internet jungle, using weak consistency replication by object distribution, asynchronous replication, and local access to objects by clients. ODS is based on two independent virtual networks, one dedicated to the distribution (replication) of objects and the other to calculate optimised distribution chains to be applied by the first network

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Replication for Web Hosting Systems

Replication is a well-known technique to improve the accessibility of Web sites. It generally offers reduced client latencies and increases a site’s availability. However, applying replication techniques is not trivial, and various Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been created to facilitate replication for digital content providers. Th

Distributed Dynamic Replica Placement and Request Redirection in Content Delivery Networks

Chiara Petrioli, Giancarlo Bongiovanni, Francesco Lo Prest

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Global Data Plane: A Widely Distributed Storage and Communication Infrastructure

With the advancement of technology, richer computation devices are making their way into everyday life. However, such smarter devices merely act as a source and sink of information; the storage of information is highly centralized in data-centers in today’s world. Even though such data-centers allow for amortization of cost per bit of information, the density and distribution of such data-centers is not necessarily representative of human population density. This disparity of where the information is produced and consumed vs where it is stored only slightly affects the applications of today, but it will be the limiting factor for applications of tomorrow.The computation resources at the edge are more powerful than ever, and present an opportunity to address this disparity. We envision that a seamless combination of these edge-resources with the data-center resources is the way forward. However, the resulting issues of trust and data-security are not easy to solve in a world full of complexity. Toward this vision of a federated infrastructure composed of resources at the edge as well as those in data-centers, we describe the architecture and design of a widely distributed system for data storage and communication that attempts to alleviate some of these data security challenges; we call this system the Global Data Plane (GDP).The key abstraction in the GDP is a secure cohesive container of information called a DataCapsule, which provides a layer of uniformity on top of a heterogeneous infrastructure. A DataCapsule represents a secure history of transactions in a persistent form that can be used for building other applications on top. Existing applications can be refactored to use DataCapsules as the ground truth of persistent state; such a refactoring enables cleaner application design that allows for better security analysis of information flows. Not only cleaner design, the GDP also enables locality of access for performance and data privacy—an ever growing concern in the information age.The DataCapsules are enabled by an underlying routing fabric, called the GDP network, which provides secure routing for datagrams in a flat namespace. The GDP network is a core component of the GDP that enables various GDP components to interact with each other. In addition to the DataCapsules, this underlying network is available to applications for native communication as well. Flat namespace networks are known to provide a number of desirable properties, such as location independence, built-in multicast, etc. However, existing architectures for such networks suffer from routing security issues, typically because malicious entities can claim to possess arbitrary names and thus, receive traffic intended for arbitrary destinations. GDP network takes a different approach by defining an ownership of the name and the associated mechanisms for participants to delegate routing for such names to others. By directly integrating with GDP network, applications can enjoy the benefits of flat namespace networks without compromising routing security.The Global Data Plane and DataCapsules together represent our vision for secure ubiquitous storage. As opposed to the current approach of perimeter security for infrastructure, i.e. drawing a perimeter around parts of infrastructure and trusting everything inside it, our vision is to use cryptographic tools to enable intrinsic security for the information itself regardless of the context in which such information lives. In this dissertation, we show how to make this vision a reality, and how to adapt real world applications to reap the benefits of secure ubiquitous storage