Analyzing the impact of storage shortage on data availability in decentralized online social networks.

Songling Fu,Ligang He,Chenlin Huang,Kenli Li,Xiangke Liao

doi:10.1155/2014/826145

Abstract

Maintaining data availability is one of the biggest challenges in decentralized online social networks (DOSNs). The existing work often assumes that the friends of a user can always contribute to the sufficient storage capacity to store all data. However, this assumption is not always true in today's online social networks (OSNs) due to the fact that nowadays the users often use the smart mobile devices to access the OSNs. The limitation of the storage capacity in mobile devices may jeopardize the data availability. Therefore, it is desired to know the relation between the storage capacity contributed by the OSN users and the level of data availability that the OSNs can achieve. This paper addresses this issue. In this paper, the data availability model over storage capacity is established. Further, a novel method is proposed to predict the data availability on the fly. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the data availability model and the on-the-fly prediction.

Highlights

In the last decade, online social networks (OSNs), such as Facebook [1], Twitter, and Sina Weibo [2], have gained extreme popularity with more than a billion users worldwide
We show how to use the exponential distribution to derive the on-the-fly prediction for the number of online friends
This paper proposes a data availability model over storage capacity for decentralized online social networks (DOSNs)

Summary

Introduction

Online social networks (OSNs), such as Facebook [1], Twitter, and Sina Weibo [2], have gained extreme popularity with more than a billion users worldwide. The OSN platforms are typically centralized, where the users store their data in the centralized servers deployed by the OSN service providers. In DOSNs, in order to protect the data privacy the centralized servers are bypassed and the data published by a user are stored and disseminated only among the friend circle of the user [9, 10]. DOSNs can help protect the data privacy, maintaining data availability becomes a big challenge. This is because if a friend of the user is offline, the data stored in the friend cannot be accessed by other friends

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