FRoDO: Friendly routing over dunbar-based overlays

Centralized Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become the main communication channel in both the personal and the business domain. A current trend for developing OSN services is towards the distribution of the social network infrastructure by using P2P architectures as basis for Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs). One of the main challenges of DOSNs comes from guaranteeing privacy and protection of private data. In previous work [18], we proposed a Dunbar-based approach to preserve data availability in DOSNs. Using Dunbar´s circles of intimacy a certain level of trust is ensured which bases on the users confidence in their friends. Now, to achieve privacy and anonymity, we focus on the incorporation of social contacts into existing Peer-to-Peer Overlays and show that a naive integration of social links into existing Overlays like Chord and Pastry is not satisfactory. In order to address drawbacks of the naive approach we introduce goLLuM, a general solution which can be used on top of existing structured and unstructured P2P networks. Our protocol enables to route messages via friendly nodes only, even if only few friends per node exist. By using synthetic models and real-data traces for the representation of friendship relationships we highlight the drawbacks of the naive solution and show the functionality of goLLuM.