CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice

Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur

WEBGOP : collaborative Web services based on graph-oriented programming

2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Rethinking Consistency Management in Real-time Collaborative Editing Systems

Networked computer systems offer much to support collaborative editing of shared documents among users. Increasing concurrent access to shared documents by allowing multiple users to contribute to and/or track changes to these shared documents is the goal of real-time collaborative editing systems (RTCES); yet concurrent access is either limited in existing systems that employ exclusive locking or concurrency control algorithms such as operational transformation (OT) may be employed to enable concurrent access. Unfortunately, such OT based schemes are costly with respect to communication and computation. Further, existing systems are often specialized in their functionality and require users to adopt new, unfamiliar software to enable collaboration. This research discusses our work in improving consistency management in RTCES. We have developed a set of deadlock-free multi-granular dynamic locking algorithms and data structures that maximize concurrent access to shared documents while minimizing communication cost. These algorithms provide a high level of service for concurrent access to the shared document and integrate merge-based or OT-based consistency maintenance policies locally among a subset of the users within a subsection of the document – thus reducing the communication costs in maintaining consistency. Additionally, we have developed client-server and P2P implementations of our hierarchical document management algorithms. Simulations results indicate that our approach achieves significant communication and computation cost savings. We have also developed a hierarchical reduction algorithm that can minimize the space required of RTCES, and this algorithm may be pipelined through our document tree. Further, we have developed an architecture that allows for a heterogeneous set of client editing software to connect with a heterogeneous set of server document repositories via Web services. This architecture supports our algorithms and does not require client or server technologies to be modified – thus it is able to accommodate existing, favored editing and repository tools. Finally, we have developed a prototype benchmark system of our architecture that is responsive to users’ actions and minimizes communication costs

Cooperative Interval Caching in Clustered Multimedia Servers

In this project, we design a cooperative interval caching (CIC) algorithm for clustered video servers, and evaluate its performance through simulation. The CIC algorithm describes how distributed caches in the cluster cooperate to serve a given request. With CIC, a clustered server can accommodate twice (95%) more number of cached streams than the clustered server without cache cooperation. There are two major processes of CIC to find available cache space for a given request in the cluster: to find the server containing the information about the preceding request of the given request; and to find another server which may have available cache space if the current server turns out not to have enough cache space. The performance study shows that it is better to direct the requests of the same movie to the same server so that a request can always find the information of its preceding request from the same server. The CIC algorithm uses scoreboard mechanism to achieve this goal. The performance results also show that when the current server fails to find cache space for a given request, randomly selecting a server works well to find the next server which may have available cache space. The combination of scoreboard and random selection to find the preceding request information and the next available server outperforms other combinations of different approaches by 86%. With CIC, the cooperative distributed caches can support as many cached streams as one integrated cache does. In some cases, the cooperative distributed caches accommodate more number of cached streams than one integrated cache would do. The CIC algorithm makes every server in the cluster perform identical tasks to eliminate any single point of failure, there by increasing availability of the server cluster. The CIC algorithm also specifies how to smoothly add or remove a server to or from the cluster to provide the server with scalability