H2020 IOStack

R. Gracia-Tinedo, P. García-López, A. Gómez and A. Illana

IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD'16)

Data sharing in Personal Clouds blurs the lines between on-line storage and content distribution with a strong social component. Such social information may be exploited by researchers to devise optimized data management techniques for Personal Clouds. Unfortunately, due their proprietary nature, data sharing is one of the least studied facets of these systems.

In this work, we present the first study of data sharing in a private Personal Cloud. Concretely, we contribute a dataset collected at the metadata back-end of NEC: an enterprise oriented Personal Cloud. First, our analysis provides a deep inspection of the storage layer of NEC, comparing it with a well-known public vendor (UbuntuOne). Second, we study the social structure of NEC user communities, as well as the storage characteristics of user sharing links via multiplex network techniques.

Finally, we discuss a battery of data management optimizations for NEC derived from our findings, which may be of independent interest for other similar systems. Our proposals include content distribution, caching and data placement. We believe that both our study and dataset will foster further research in this field.