SocialGate: Managing large-scale social data on home gateways

Abstract

Today, Online Social Networks (OSNs) are ubiquitous means of communication. In order to prevent the misuse of personal user data by OSN providers, various research efforts have produced a multitude of approaches to decentralize OSNs in the past decade. The most critical challenge for these systems is to replace the infrastructure of centralized OSNs. That is, they need to handle the large amounts of data uploaded by users on one end, and requests towards that data on the other end. Typically, existing approaches instrumentalize cloud facilities or user devices for this task. Unfortunately, they introduce either a monetary cost for users or have limited success in making data highly available. In this work we propose SocialGate, the first prototype that makes use of home routers of users as the infrastructure backbone of the OSN to avoid these shortcomings. Measurements and experiments based on real-world data support the feasibility and practicability of our approach.