Peer-Assisted Semi-Persistent Online Storage and Distribution: Design, Analysis and Modeling

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Peer-Assisted Semi-Persistent Online Storage and Distribution: Design, 
Analysis and Modeling"

By

Mr. Ye SUN


Abstract

Though online storage systems in the Internet have provided valuable 
services to share files among end users, such services are typically 
provided by dedicated servers with prohibitive server bandwidth costs as 
the systems scale up. It is intuitive, but non-trivial, to mitigate such 
costs by taking advantage of peer upload bandwidth in a complementary 
fashion. This thesis presents FS2You, a large-scale and real-world online 
storage and distribution system with peer assistance and semi-persistent 
file availability. FS2You is designed to dramatically mitigate server 
bandwidth costs. In this thesis, we show a number of key challenges 
involved in such a design objective, our architectural and protocol design 
in response to these challenges, as well as an extensive measurement study 
at a large scale to demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, using 
real-world traces that we have collected. Furthermore, we propose a 
dedicated server protocol design model for such systems, in order to make 
better use of limited server storage and bandwidth resources to guarantee 
adequate levels of service quality in terms of file availability and 
downloading performance. Our design serves as a framework with tunable 
design knobs offering flexible design choices to service providers. Using 
real-world dataset that we have collected, we evaluate our protocol design 
through extensive experimental studies from different perspectives, which 
demonstrate the effectiveness of our design and a number of practical 
guidelines. To our knowledge, this study represents the first attempt to 
design, implement, evaluate and model a new peer-assisted semi-persistent 
online storage and distribution system at a realistic scale.


Date:			Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Time:			1:30pm-3:30pm

Venue:			Room 4480
 			Lifts 25-26

Committee Members:	Dr. Bo Li (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Lei Chen (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****