Facilitating the deployment of ad-hoc virtual organizations with integrated social and overlay networks

Abstract

Deploying virtual organizations (VOs) is difficult for small- and medium-scale collaborations: the overheads in establishing and managing trust, and in deploying and managing computational resources distributed across multiple organizations are daunting to many potential users, presenting a barrier to entry that significantly hinders wider deployment of VOs. We advocate an approach where social networking and self-configuring overlay virtual networks are integrated in a novel way that allows simple deployment and management of ad-hoc infrastructures for VOs. There are three central principles in our approach: (1) user relationships which have been increasingly recorded in social networking systems provide the opportunity to bootstrap trust relationships; (2) connections established at a social networking layer can efficiently be mapped to the IP layer of virtual network overlays to support existing TCP/IP applications for collaboration and resource sharing while maintaining security against untrusted parties; and (3) systems integrating social and virtual networks can be self-configuring, enabling deployment of collaborative infrastructures by non-experts. We discuss motivations for this approach, describe a prototype implementation which integrates the Facebook social network and the IPOP overlay network, and discuss a use case scenario towards ad-hoc social cycle-sharing virtual Condor pools.