Decentralized Online Social Network Using Peer-to-Peer Technology

Abstract

This paper presents a social network with a peer-to-peer architecture that facilitates social computing services in distributed environments. This social network aims to provide users the capability of managing the dissemination of user data, searching user data on the data silos of the network, and consolidating user data from various social networks. The social network employs a super peer peer-to-peer architecture that contains peers and super peers. Users use peers to participate the network and services. Peers with sufficient storage, bandwidth and processing power become super peers that support peers for complex operations such as user authentication or group communication. We have extended the Gnutella protocol to provide the authentication and posting services on the social network. The design of these services copes with the distributed setting of the social network. The evaluation of the prototyping social network has performed on a number of laboratory workstations to investigate its scalability, reliability and performance.