PeerVault: A distributed peer-to-peer platform for reliable data backup

Abstract

Large scale peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are envisioned as a way to provide online storage service. For a reliable storage service, the participating peers are required to maintain strict commitments for their online duration. On the other hand, recent results show that users participating in volunteer computing collectively exhibit certain patterns in terms of their long-term availability, a metric that denotes periodic online durations for a considerably long time interval. In this article we introduce PeerVault, a P2P platform that leverages the long-term availability of the computer users to form a distributed reliable storage service, targeted to backup of personal data. We further present a distributed monitoring scheme that assists PeerVault to detect peer churns and ensure the reliability of the proposed backup service. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to describe the architecture of a reliable P2P backup service exploiting the long-term availability and idle resources of computing devices. We conduct experiments based on the availability traces of hundreds of thousands of hosts from the SETI@home computing project. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is effective in terms of availability as well as reliability of the offered backup service. © Springer-Verlag 2013.