Sos: Social Network-Based Distributed Data Storage

Storing large amounts of data is challenging as it requires large reliable storage space. Currently, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been implemented for this purpose. However, these systems provide no guarantee of data retrieval as the data availability is determined by the interest of the users. On the other hand, cloud storage systems, built on top of a pool of powerful servers, can provide reliable data storage; however, they are costly and vulnerable to privacy leakage. This paper proposes a novel distributed data storage system based on the social networks. Particularly, our system utilizes the social information of the users to find the potential storage nodes. The storage nodes are then selected based on the social ties with the data owner. In order to quickly obtain the potential storage nodes, we provide an efficient algorithm to search and compute the social ties in the social networks. The system performance is verified through both theoretical analysis and simulations. The results show that data stored in our proposed system is reliable and stable given the random nature of storage nodes joining and leaving the system. A marginal performance gain is achieved in comparison to P2P systems.