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Efficient peer-to-peer backup services through buffering at the edge Abstract-The availability of end devices of peer-to-peer storage and backup systems has been shown critical for usability and for system reliability in practice. This has led to the adoption of hybrid architectures composed of both peers and servers. Such architectures mask the instability of peers thus approaching the performances of client-server systems while providing scalability at a low cost. In this paper, we advocate the replacement of such servers by a cloud of residential gateways, as they are already present in users' homes, thus pushing the required stable components at the edge of the network. In our gateway-assisted system, gateways act as buffers between peers, compensating for their intrinsic instability. This enables to offload backup tasks quickly from the user's machine to the gateway, while significantly lowering the retrieval time of backed up data. We evaluate our proposal using real world traces including existing traces from Skype and Jabber as well as a trace of residential gateways for availability, and a residential broadband trace for bandwidth. Results show that the time required to backup data in the network is comparable to a server-assisted approach, while substantially improving the time to restore data, which drops from a few days to a few hours. As gateways are becoming increasingly powerful in order to enable new services, we expect such a proposal to be leveraged on a short term basis.

Devices forming a Home Network have different capabilities and interfaces, discouraging users to organize their large digital content libraries. To help users, we propose to organize the Home Network according to a gateway-centric architecture, where the content access unification is realized at the file system level and where no additional software installation on devices is required. Solutions for realizing this unification individually exist for the various devices making up the Home Network (UPnP/DLNA devices, personal computers, cloud storage systems, etc). Unifying the content access at the file system level offers a powerful lever for many legacy applications, as far as these applications can access all shared data in the Home Network. Users can thus continue to use their PC's file manager or favorite media player to browse or display shared content. An indexing application, running on the gateway, possibly managed by the ISP and accessible from any device via a simple web interface, enables more powerful content retrieval and user experience. Such application may be enriched to offer additional services like content format adaptation, duplication detection or automatic backup. Lastly we describe how this gateway-centric architecture can be leveraged by cloud applications such as distributed storage systems.

The next generation of TV studios will certainly rely on a communications infrastructure based on Ethernet and the IP protocol, but the evolution from the present heterogeneous format centric TV studio towards the homogeneous full IP TV studio demands the development of a series of new IP/TV protocols, and new software and hardware modules. This is so, because the original Ethernet and IP technologies are besteffort communications structures, and hence, not suited to the stringent: real-time, high quality, and security requirements, of a TV production facility. This paper presents the implementation of a prototype of a full Ethernet/IP TV studio and describes the different technologies, i.e., IP/television protocols and hardware and software modules, that have been developed, or that are in the process of development, in order to achieve it.

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