Social Overlays Meet the Cloud: A Hybrid Architecture for Profile Dissemination in Decentralized Social Networks

Bridging separate communities with common interest in distributed social networks through the use of social objects

“…DOSNs are considered in many works in the literature as a possible solution to give users greater control over their data and, at the same time, to overcome typical problems of centralized online social networks, such as privacy, performance bottleneck, single point of failure, need to be online in all transactions, unexploited locality [1], [24], [25], [27].…”

“…Due to the churn in the Social Overlay (SO), a limited set of links may be available for reconfiguration and cause transient network partitions, which are responsible of long unacceptable delays in the content diffusion phase [25], [39]. As a solution to this issue, a hybrid architecture is proposed in [25] that on the one hand exploits the SO for fast, decentralized and friend-to-friend communications, but occasionally exploits the access to the cloud to overcome the high delays caused by the purely decentralized solution.…”

“…Due to the churn in the Social Overlay (SO), a limited set of links may be available for reconfiguration and cause transient network partitions, which are responsible of long unacceptable delays in the content diffusion phase [25], [39]. As a solution to this issue, a hybrid architecture is proposed in [25] that on the one hand exploits the SO for fast, decentralized and friend-to-friend communications, but occasionally exploits the access to the cloud to overcome the high delays caused by the purely decentralized solution. Comparing it with our work, we see the analogy between the transient network partitions and the separate Communities of Interest, but the focus is slightly different because, while in our case a Source node wants to spread a content to all the interested network nodes, the goal in [25] is to allow efficient profile-based communication between direct friends.…”

“…As a solution to this issue, a hybrid architecture is proposed in [25] that on the one hand exploits the SO for fast, decentralized and friend-to-friend communications, but occasionally exploits the access to the cloud to overcome the high delays caused by the purely decentralized solution. Comparing it with our work, we see the analogy between the transient network partitions and the separate Communities of Interest, but the focus is slightly different because, while in our case a Source node wants to spread a content to all the interested network nodes, the goal in [25] is to allow efficient profile-based communication between direct friends. In both cases, however, the problem lies in the limited set of available links.…”

“…In both cases, however, the problem lies in the limited set of available links. Unlike the solution presented in [25], in which the concept of purely distributed architecture is lost, in our case we want to show the advantages in terms of reachability that are obtained by extending the set of friendships through social object relationships (SIoT Contact List), while still maintaining a distributed approach to reach any interested node belonging to other communities.…”