Current migration mechanisms for multimedia content in ubiquitous environments lack simplicity and wide deployment across user personal devices. To address this concern, we focus on prospects of wider adoption by designing and implementing a mechanism that enables the user to easily migrate media context between her Internet-enabled devices, regardless of the networks they access. Our proposed architecture employs open web standards while highly prioritizing modularity and sketches a path to increase device compatibility.

Previous studies of large-scale (multimillion node) Kademlia-based DHTs have shown poor performance, measured in seconds; in contrast to the far more optimistic results from theoretical analysis, simulations and testbeds. In this paper, we unexpectedly find that in the Mainline BitTorrent DHT (MDHT), probably the largest DHT overlay on the Internet, many lookups already yield results in less than a second, albeit not consistently. With our backwards-compatible modifications, we show that not only can we reduce median latencies to between 100 and 200 ms, but also consistently achieve sub-second lookups. These results suggest that it is possible to deploy latency-sensitive applications on top of large-scale DHT overlays on the Internet, contrary to what some might have concluded based on previous results reported in the literature.

The birth and evolution of peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols have, for the most part, been about peer discovery. Napster, one of the first P2P protocols, was basically FTP/HTTP plus a way of finding hosts willing to send you the file. Since then, both the transfer and peer discovery mechanisms have improved, but only recently have we seen a real push to completely decentralized peer discovery to increase scalability and resilience. Most such efforts are based on distributed hash tables (DHTs), with Kademlia being a popular choice of DHT implementation. While sound in theory, and performing well in simulators and testbeds, the real-world performance often falls short of expectations. Our hypothesis is that the connectivity artifacts caused by guarded hosts (i.e., hosts behind firewalls and NATs) are the major cause for such poor performance. In this paper, the first steps towards testing this hypothesis are developed. First, we present a taxonomy of connectivity properties which will become the language used to accurately describe connectivity artifacts. Second, based on experiments "in the wild", we analyze the connectivity properties of over 3 million hosts. Finally, we match those properties to guarded host behavior and identify the potential effects on the DHT.

Mobile wireless devices have intermittent connectivity, sometimes intentional. This is a problem for conventional Mobile IP, beyond its well-known routing inefficiencies and deployment issues. DHARMA selects a location-optimized instance from a distributed set of home agents to minimize routing overheads; set management and optimization are done using the PlanetLab overlay network. DHARMA's session support overcomes both transitions between home agent instances and intermittent connectivity. Cross-layer information sharing between the session layer and the overlay network are used to exploit multiple wireless links when available. The DHARMA prototype supports intermittently connected legacy TCP applications in a variety of scenarios and is largely portable across host operating systems. Experiments with DHARMA deployed on more than 200 PlanetLab nodes demonstrate routing performance consistently better than that for best-case Mobile IP.

Most massively multiplayer game servers employ static partitioning of their game world into distinct mini-worlds that are hosted on separate servers. This limits cross-server interactions between players, and exposes the division of the world to players. We have designed and implemented an architecture in which the partitioning of game regions across servers is transparent to players and interactions are not limited to objects in a single region or server. This allows a finer grain partitioning, which combined with a dynamic load management algorithm enables us to better handle transient crowding by adaptively dispersing or aggregating regions from servers in response to quality of service violations.Our load balancing algorithm is aware of the spatial locality in the virtual game world. Based on localized information, the algorithm balances the load and reduces the cross server communication, while avoiding frequent reassignment of regions. Our results show that locality aware load balancing reduces the average user response time by up to a factor of 6 compared to a global algorithm that does not consider spatial locality and by up to a factor of 8 compared to static partitioning.

Proxy-based transcoding adapts Web content to be a better match for client capabilities (such as screen size and color depth) and last-hop bandwidths. Traditional transcoding breaks the end-to-end model of the Web, because the proxy does not know the semantics of the content. Server-directed transcoding preserves end-to-end semantics while supporting aggressive content transformations.We show how server-directed transcoding can be integrated into the HTTP protocol and into the implementation of a proxy. We discuss several useful transformations for image content, and present measurements of the performance impacts. Our results demonstrate that server-directed transcoding is a natural extension to HTTP, can be implemented without great complexity, and can provide good performance when carefully implemented.

Quickly transmitting large datasets in the context of distributed computing on wide area networks can be achieved by compressing data before transmission, However such an approach is not efficient when dealing with higher speed networks. Indeed, the time to compress a large file and to send it is greater than the time to send the uncompressed file. In this paper we explore and enhance an algorithm that allows us to overlap communications with compression and to automatically adapt the compression effort to currently available network and processor resources.