Signaling and Reciprocity:Robust Decentralized Information Flows in Social, Communication, and Computer Networks

Complex networks exist for a number of purposes. The neural, metabolic and food networks ensure our survival, while the social, economic, transportation and communication networks allow us to prosper. Independently of the purposes and particularities of the physical embodiment of the networks, one of their fundamental functions is the delivery of information from one part of the network to another. Gossip and diseases diffuse in the social networks, electrochemical signals propagate in the neural networks and data packets travel in the Internet. Engineering networks for robust information flows is a challenging task. First, the mechanism through which the network forms and changes its topology needs to be defined. Second, within a given topology, the information must be routed to the appropriate recipients. Third, both the network formation and the routing mechanisms need to be robust against a wide spectrum of failures and adversaries. Fourth, the network formation, routing and failure recovery must operate under the resource constraints, either intrinsic or extrinsic to the network. Finally, the autonomously operating parts of the network must be incentivized to contribute their resources to facilitate the information flows. This thesis tackles the above challenges within the context of several types of networks: 1) peer-to-peer overlays – computers interconnected over the Internet to form an overlay in which participants provide various services to one another, 2) mobile ad-hoc networks – mobile nodes distributed in physical space communicating wirelessly with the goal of delivering data from one part of the network to another, 3) file-sharing networks – networks whose participants interconnect over the Internet to exchange files, 4) social networks – humans disseminating and consuming information through the network of social relationships. The thesis makes several contributions. Firstly, we propose a general algorithm, which given a set of nodes embedded in an arbitrary metric space, interconnects them into a network that efficiently routes information. We apply the algorithm to the peer-to-peer overlays and experimentally demonstrate its high performance, scalability as well as resilience to continuous peer arrivals and departures. We then shift our focus to the problem of the reliability of routing in the peer-to-peer overlays. Each overlay peer has limited resources and when they are exhausted this ultimately leads to delayed or lost overlay messages. All the solutions addressing this problem rely on message redundancy, which significantly increases the resource costs of fault-tolerance. We propose a bandwidth-efficient single-path Forward Feedback Protocol (FFP) for overlay message routing in which successfully delivered messages are followed by a feedback signal to reinforce the routing paths. Internet testbed evaluation shows that FFP uses 2-5 times less network bandwidth than the existing protocols relying on message redundancy, while achieving comparable fault-tolerance levels under a variety of failure scenarios. While the Forward Feedback Protocol is robust to message loss and delays, it is vulnerable to malicious message injection. We address this and other security problems by proposing Castor, a variant of FFP for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). In Castor, we use the same general mechanism as in FFP; each time a message is routed, the routing path is either enforced or weakened by the feedback signal depending on whether the routing succeeded or not. However, unlike FFP, Castor employs cryptographic mechanisms for ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the messages. We compare Castor to four other MANET routing protocols. Despite Castor's simplicity, it achieves up to 40% higher packet delivery rates than the other protocols and recovers at least twice as fast as the other protocols in a wide range of attacks and failure scenarios. Both of our protocols, FFP and Castor, rely on simple signaling to improve the routing robustness in peer-to-peer and mobile ad-hoc networks. Given the success of the signaling mechanism in shaping the information flows in these two types of networks, we examine if signaling plays a similar crucial role in the on-line social networks. We characterize the propagation of URLs in the social network of Twitter. The data analysis uncovers several statistical regularities in the user activity, the social graph, the structure of the URL cascades as well as the communication and signaling dynamics. Based on these results, we propose a propagation model that accurately predicts which users are likely to mention which URLs. We outline a number of applications where the social network information flow modelling would be crucial: content ranking and filtering, viral marketing and spam detection. Finally, we consider the problem of freeriding in peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, when users can download data from others, but never reciprocate by uploading. To address the problem, we propose a variant of the BitTorrent system in which two peers are only allowed to connect if their owners know one another in the real world. When the users know which other users their BitTorrent client connects to, they are more likely to cooperate. The social network becomes the content distribution network and the freeriding problem is solved by leveraging the social norms and reciprocity to stabilize cooperation rather than relying on technological means. Our extensive simulation shows that the social network topology is an efficient and scalable content distribution medium, while at the same time provides robustness to freeriding

Bandwidth-efficient delay- and loss-tolerant overlay routing

Motivation. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are mostly deployed in heterogeneous environments with resource availability varying not only across the nodes but also over time. If any of the shared computational, storage or network resources are exhausted, failures and delays occur. The commonly used crash-stop failure model assumes that once a node stops sending messages it never again resumes. Such failures are trivially detected and appropriate algorithms are run that maintain the connectivity and routing efficiency of the P2P overlay under continuous arrivals and departures of the peers (i.e. churn) [6], [4]. The failure detection mechanisms in the crashstop model are typically tuned to minimize th

Fuzzynet: Zero-maintenance Ringless Overlay

Many structured overlay networks rely on a ring invariant as a core network connectivity element. The responsibility ranges of the participating peers and navigability principles (greedy routing) heavily depend on the ring structure. For correctness guarantees, each node needs to eagerly maintain its immediate neighboring links - the ring invariant. However, the ring maintenance is an expensive task and it may not even be possible to maintain the ring invariant continuously under high churn, particularly as the network size grows. Furthermore, routing anomalies in the network, peers behind firewalls and Network Address Translators (NATs) create non-transitivity effects, which inevitably lead to the violation of the ring invariant. We argue that reliance on the ring structure is a serious impediment for real life deployment and scalability of structured overlays. In this paper we propose an overlay called Fuzzynet, which does not rely on the ring invariant, yet have all the functionalities of structured overlays. Fuzzynet takes the idea of lazy overlay maintenance further by dropping any explicit connectivity and data maintenance requirement, relying merely on the actions performed when new Fuzzynet peers join the network. We show that with sufficient amount of neighbors (O(logN), comparable to traditional structured overlays), even under high churn, data can be retrieved in Fuzzynet w.h.p. We validate our novel design principles by simulations as well as PlanetLab experiments and compare it with ring based overlays

More on Castor: the Scalable Secure Routing for Ad-hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are inherently vulnerable, as any node can disrupt the communication of potentially any other node in the network. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed. In this paper, we take a fresh and comprehensive approach, simultaneously addressing three aspects: security, scalability and adaptability to changing network conditions. Our communication protocol, Castor, occupies a unique point in the design space: it does not use any control messages except simple packet acknowledgments, and each node makes routing decisions locally and independently of other nodes without exchanging routing state with them. This novel design makes Castor resilient to a wide range of attacks and allows it to scale to large network sizes and to remain efficient under high mobility. We compare Castor against four representative protocols from the literature. Our protocol achieves up to two times higher packet delivery rates, particularly in large and highly volatile networks, incurs no or only limited additional overhead and it is able to survive more severe attacks and recovers from them faster

Drug-induced eRF1 degradation promotes readthrough and reveals a new branch of ribosome quality control.

Suppression of premature termination codons (PTCs) by translational readthrough is a promising strategy to treat a wide variety of severe genetic diseases caused by nonsense mutations. Here, we present two potent readthrough promoters-NVS1.1 and NVS2.1-that restore substantial levels of functional full-length CFTR and IDUA proteins in disease models for cystic fibrosis and Hurler syndrome, respectively. In contrast to other readthrough promoters that affect stop codon decoding, the NVS compounds stimulate PTC suppression by triggering rapid proteasomal degradation of the translation termination factor eRF1. Our results show that this occurs by trapping eRF1 in the terminating ribosome, causing ribosome stalls and subsequent ribosome collisions, and activating a branch of the ribosome-associated quality control network, which involves the translational stress sensor GCN1 and the catalytic activity of the E3 ubiquitin ligases RNF14 and RNF25

Friend-to-Friend Computing: Building the Social Web at the Internet Edges

Abstract—The current Social Web is centralized. Large information silos store all the users ’ profiles, their social links and much of the other personal data. In return for the reliable service the users allow their data and activities to be data mined by the service providers, which in this way increase their advertising revenue. As the social applications are storing increasingly more data and attracting more users, many questions about privacy, data ownership and data portability arise. In this paper we are going to critically assess the current state of the Social Web, identify several novel research problems and outline the possible solution: friend-tofriend computing (F2F). F2F is a completely decentralized architecture in which two computers can communicate only if their owners know one another. Constraining the connections to friends-only solves many of the security problems of the peer-to-peer architectures. We argue that a reliable social application platform can be built using F2F as the substrate. The platform gives the users much more control over their data than the current Social Web and ensures the level of privacy and security not possible in any centralized architecture. Groups can easily build their own ad-hoc networks and collaborate without the need for any servers or third-party services. I