PEER TO PEER NETWORK CODING

Network coding is a new research area that may have interesting applications in practical networking systems. With network coding, intermediate nodes may send out packets that are linear combinations of previously received information. There are two main benefits of this approach: potential throughput improvements and a high degree of robustness. Robustness translates into loss resilience and facilitates the design of simple distributed algorithms that perform well, even if decisions are based only on partial information. Here we explain what network coding does and how it does it. We also discuss the implications of theoretical results on network coding for realistic settings and show how network coding can be used in practice.
In particular, we show that Network Coding is practical in a P2P setting since it incurs little overhead, both in terms of CPU processing and I/O activity, and it results in smooth, fast downloads, and efficient server utilization. We also study the importance of topology construction algorithms in real scenarios and study the effect of peers behind NATs and firewalls, showing that the system is surprisingly robust to large number of unreachable peers. Finally, we present performance results related to verifying network encoded blocks on-the-fly using special security primitives called Secure-Random-Checksums.

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NFS ARCHITECTURE by Mudit Garg

NFS^2 provides a mechanism for uniting NFS servers under a single namespace. It simplifies management of multiple NFS servers by providing access to all servers through a single namespace (no need for multiple client mount points), and by providing a transparent mechanism for the addition of new servers as the system grows. This system avoids distributed lock management, which has been a limiting factor in the scalability of cluster file systems. NFS^2 supports heterogeneous physical file systems within the single namespace, whereas other systems have relied on their ownproprietary physical file systems.

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