Comparison of P2P Social Network Architectures

Abstract

In recent years, online social networks have become very popular. Online social networks (OSN) have been useful to find former classmates or to improve our interaction with friends. Thus, a huge amount of information is generated and consumed by millions of people in these types of networks. Currently, most popular online social networks are based on centralized servers, whom are responsible management and storage all the information. Although the benefits of social networks are well known to most of us, these networks still have many challenges such as scalability, privacy or dependence. In this work, we evaluate P2P infrastructures as alternative platform for developing decentralized online social networks. In particular, we simulate and evaluate a specific social network called Tribler on two types of P2P architectures: super-peer and distributed. Our results shown that OSN based on super-peer reaches best download time than OSN based on a distributed P2P architecture.