Socially-Aware Distributed Hash Tables for Decentralized Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a socially-aware DHT for decentralized online social networks, improving search efficiency and communication reliability by leveraging social relationships in a gossip-based placement algorithm.

Contribution

It presents a novel socially-aware DHT design with a gossip-based user placement algorithm tailored for DOSNs, enhancing performance and trust.

Findings

30% reduction in lookup latency

10% improvement in communication reliability

Effective social-aware user placement

Abstract

Many decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have been proposed due to an increase in awareness related to privacy and scalability issues in centralized social networks. Such decentralized networks transfer processing and storage functionalities from the service providers towards the end users. DOSNs require individualistic implementation for services, (i.e., search, information dissemination, storage, and publish/subscribe). However, many of these services mostly perform social queries, where OSN users are interested in accessing information of their friends. In our work, we design a socially-aware distributed hash table (DHTs) for efficient implementation of DOSNs. In particular, we propose a gossip-based algorithm to place users in a DHT, while maximizing the social awareness among them. Through a set of experiments, we show that our approach reduces the lookup latency by almost 30% and improves the reliability of the communication by nearly 10% via trusted contacts.