Peer to Peer (P2P) Social Networks: An Improvement on Availability in a Trusted Way

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide the easiest way to stay connected to the people dear and important to us. People are using social networking sites for sending messages, sharing files and expressing their thoughts to others. Popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace are web based. Users register with their services and agree to provide their private data to the OSN providers. OSN providers use centralized server. User data can be shared and updated easily in this fashion. But OSN providers give users a limited control over their data. Social networking sites actually contain huge amount of personal data which is a great source for learning the habits of consumers and can be used for commercial benefits. As the social networking sites are centralized, they also exhibit scalability and connectivity problems. So, the new generation social networks need to be distributed, free from third party and users will have full control over their data. Peer to Peer (P2P) infrastructure has become really important for designing distributed social networks. The features of a P2P based system are: P2P scales so well, locality of peers can be taken into account and social networking can be done without any internet connectivity in some mobile devices, people will have full control over their content. So, P2P based social networks can be our new generation of social networks with high degree of privacy and scalability. But the dimension shift from the centralized paradigm to a P2P paradigm makes the whole system really challenging. How the information will be stored, shared and cached in secured way are the major challenges of a P2P based social network. Existing P2P based social networks use friend peers as a trusted medium for caching other user data to improve the availability. In this research, we propose a new idea for caching data in non-friend trusted peers in a secured way. We will show system architecture for implementing this idea, protocols and algorithms for this technique which can be used by any existing P2P based social network for improving availability.