Subtitle: The clash of the buzzword titans!
Peer-to-peer (P2P) and cloud computing, two major Internet trends of the last decade, hold similar promises: the (virtually) unlimited availability of computing and storage resources. However, important differences exist: the cloud provides highly available resources, but at a monetary cost; P2P resources are available at no cost, but their availability is affected by churn.
Together with Luca Abeni, Hannah Kavalionak, and Benedikt Elser, we investigated a novel approach to constructing dependable applications by leveraging the cloud to ensure highly available and durable services, while exploiting P2P resources whenever they are available. The novelty of our proposal lies in the integration of the gossip paradigm with a storage cloud, which enables the monetary cost of the cloud to be kept under control—whether in the presence of a single peer or of millions. These ideas were first presented in Kyoto at [P2P11] and later extended in [IWSOS12]. We subsequently applied them to massively multiuser online games, in collaboration with the University of Pisa [PPNA15], and to the problem of NAT traversal [SAC16].
In 2015, Pedro Garcia Lopez, Dick Epema, Anwitaman Datta, Teruo Higashino, Adriana Iamnitchi, Marinho Barcellos, Pascal Felber, Etienne Riviere, and I co-authored a position paper on edge-centric computing [SIGCOMM15].
[P2P11] Alberto Montresor and Luca Abeni. Cloudy weather for P2P, with a chance of gossip. In Proc. of the 11th IEEE P2P Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P’11), pages 250–259. IEEE, August 2011. Best paper award. [PDF],[Bibtex].
[IWSOS12] Hanna Kavalionak and Alberto Montresor. P2P and cloud: A marriage of convenience for replica management. In Proc. of the 7th IFIP Int. Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (IWSOS’12), number 7166 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 60–71. Springer, Delft, The Netherlands, March 2012. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[PPNA15] Hanna Kavalionak, Emanuele Carlini, Laura Ricci, Alberto Montresor, and Massimo Coppola. Integrating peer-to-peer and cloud computing for massively multiuser online games. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Application, 8(2):301–319, 2015. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[SAC16] Hanna Kavalionak, Amir Payberah, Alberto Montresor, and Jim Dowling. NATCloud: Cloud-assisted NAT-traversal service. In Proc. of the 31st Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC’16. ACM, Pisa, Italy, April 2016. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[SIGCOMM15] Pedro Garcia Lopez, Alberto Montresor, Dick Epema, Anwitaman Datta, Teruo Higashino, Adriana Iamnitchi, Marinho Barcellos, Pascal Felber, and Etienne Riviere. Edge-centric computing: Vision and challenges. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 45(5):37–42, September 2015. [PDF], [Bibtex].