A Socio-Aware Decentralized Topology Construction Protocol

Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) offer an alternative to the usual centralized solutions, that promises to preserve more control of a user's data to the user herself. An important aspect in the design of DOSNs is the selection of the Peer-to-Peer overlay network. We propose the use of an augmented Pastry-based overlay network design, so as to produce a topology that incorporates the social network. Our augmentation aims to reduce the number of overlay hops required for the communication between two users in the social network. We experimentally show that our approach reduces the number of overlay hops and the total latency between two socially connected users versus the standard Pastry overlay. Additionally, we compare our approach with Sprout, a Chord alternative, and show that in many cases we achieve similarly low latency, while maintaining a bounded number of links.