ECHOS: Edge Capacity Hosting
Overlays of Nano Data Centers
Nikolaos Laoutaris
Telefonica Research
nikos@tid.es
Pablo Rodriguez
Telefonica Research
pablorr@tid.es
Laurent Massoulie
Thomson Research
laurent.massoulie@thomson.net
This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed
Authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online
ABSTRACT
In this paper we propose a radical solution to data host-
ing and delivery for the Internet of the future. The current
data delivery architecture is “network centric”, with content
stored in data centers connected directly to Internet back-
bones. This approach has multiple drawbacks among which
complexity of deploying data centers, power consumption,
and lack of scalability are the most critical ones. We pro-
pose a totally innovative and orthogonal approach to tra-
ditional data centers, through what we call “nano” data
centers, which are essentially boxes deployed at the edge
of the network (e.g., in home gateways, set-top-boxes, etc.)
that cooperate in a peer-to-peer manner. Unlike traditional
peer-to-peer clients, however, our nano data centers operate
under a common management authority, e.g., the ISP who
installs and maintains the set-top-boxes, and can thus coop-
erate more effectively and achieve a higher aggregate perfor-
mance. Nano data centers are, therefore, better suited for
providing guaranteed quality to new emerging applications
such as online gaming, interactive IPTV and VoD, and user
generated content.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.4 [Distributed Systems]: Distributed applications
General Terms
Design
Keywords
data center, peer-to-peer, set-top-box
1.
INTRODUCTION
With the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications at the be-
ginning of the decade, multimedia content including movies
and music has quickly become the dominating traffic con-
tributor on the Internet.1 For this reasons many have started
seeing the Internet not only as a communication network,
but also