SocialCDN: Caching techniques for distributed social networks

Abstract

Distributed online social networks (DOSN) have been proposed as an alternative to centralized Online Social Networks (OSN). In contrast to centralized OSN, DOSNs do not have central repository of all user data, neither impose control regarding how users data will be accessed. Therefore, users can keep control of their private data and are not at the mercy of the social network providers. However, one of the main problems in DOSNs is how to efficiently disseminate social updates among peers. In our previous work, we proposed Social Caches for social updates dissemination in DOSN. However, the selection of social caches requires knowledge about the entire social graph. In this paper, we propose four fully distributed social cache selection algorithms, and evaluate their performance on five well known graphs. Using simulations we show that these algorithms perform almost as good as the centralized best known approximation algorithm would do. These distributed caching techniques can be used as a basis for various applications such as those that represent fusions of social and vehicular networks.