vUPS: Virtually Unifying Personal Storage for Fast and Pervasive Data Accesses
Abstract:
More and more overlapping functions on all kinds of mobile devices with these on traditional computers have significantly expanded the usage of mobile devices in our daily life. This also causes the demand surge of pervasively and quickly accessing files across different personal devices owned by a user. Most existing solutions, such as DropBox and SkyDrive, rely on some centralized infrastructure (e.g., cloud storage) to synchronize files across different devices. Therefore, these solutions come with potential risks of user privacy and data secrecy. In addition, continuously maintaining strong consistency among multiple replicas of a file is very costly.
On the other hand, today a common user often owns sufficiently large storage space across her personal home desktop, office computer, and mobile devices. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to design and implement a system to virtually Unify Personal Storage (vUPS) for fast and pervasive accesses of personal data across different devices. vUPS provides similar services as offered by existing cloud-based storage services, but (1) vUPS consists of only personal computers without involving any third party, thus it minimizes the risks of user privacy and data secrecy; (2) vUPS organizes all storage in a distributed fashion so that it is not prone to the single point of failure; (3) vUPS differentiates files and maintains different consistency policies in order to reduce the consistency maintenance cost. Having implemented vUPS with HTML5, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The results show that vUPS offers similar user performance when compared to DropBox.