Solving Storage Limitations Using a Peer-to-Peer Web File System

Abstract

Running out of disk space is a problem that appears more often then one would desire, even though the hard-drive capacities are becoming larger and the price per gigabyte lower. This is mainly due to the significant increase in the data manipulated by the average computer user, as well as the expected user reluctance to go out and buy another disk when the existing one is full. Besides the usual solution of deleting useless data from the hard-drive, the user can signup for an online backup plan, and move some files there. The paper offers an alternative solution to this problem through collaborative data storage in a peer-to-peer system. The proposed system will be made transparent to the user through a user-space file system implemented using the FUSE kernel module. The peer-to-peer communication will be done using Web Services. The data discovery will be done using the Chord algorithm.