Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.
IEEE 802.15 is a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IEEE 802 standards committee which specifies wireless personal area network (WPAN) standards. There are 10 major areas of development, not all of which are active.
In computing, load balancing improves the distribution of workloads across multiple computing resources, such as computers, a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, or disk drives. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload of any single resource. Using multiple components with load balancing instead of a single component may increase reliability and availability through redundancy. Load balancing usually involves dedicated software or hardware, such as a multilayer switch or a Domain Name System server process.
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a class of a decentralized distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) which is used to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet.
SIGCOMM is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, which specializes in the field of communication and computer networks. It is also the name of an annual 'flagship' conference, organized by SIGCOMM, which is considered to be the leading conference in data communications and networking in the world. Known to have an extremely low acceptance rate (~10%), many of the landmark works in Networking and Communications have been published through it.
Checkpointing is a technique to add fault tolerance into computing systems. It basically consists of saving a snapshot of the application's state, so that it can restart from that point in case of failure. This is particularly important for long running applications that are executed in failure-prone computing systems.
A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a number of nodes, or a computer network in which users store information on a number of peer network nodes.
A home network or home area network (HAN) is a type of computer network that facilitates communication among devices within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitive tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment.
Tapestry is a peer-to-peer overlay network which provides a distributed hash table, routing, and multicasting infrastructure for distributed applications. The Tapestry peer-to-peer system offers efficient, scalable, self-repairing, location-aware routing to nearby resources.
A sensor grid integrates wireless sensor networks with grid computing concepts to enable real-time sensor data collection and the sharing of computational and storage resources for sensor data processing and management. It is an enabling technology for building large-scale infrastructures, integrating heterogeneous sensor, data and computational resources deployed over a wide area, to undertake complicated surveillance tasks such as environmental monitoring.
Carrier Ethernet is a marketing term for extensions to Ethernet to enable telecommunications network providers to provide Ethernet services to customers and to utilize Ethernet technology in their networks.
Cloud computing is the on demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server.
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET), also known as wireless ad hoc network or ad hoc wireless network, is a continuously self-configuring, infrastructure-less network of mobile devices connected wirelessly.
In communication networks, cognitive network (CN) is a new type of data network that makes use of cutting edge technology from several research areas to solve some problems current networks are faced with. Cognitive network is different from cognitive radio (CR) as it covers all the layers of the OSI model.
Social cloud computing, also peer-to-peer social cloud computing, is an area of computer science that generalizes cloud computing to include the sharing, bartering and renting of computing resources across peers whose owners and operators are verified through a social network or reputation system. It expands cloud computing past the confines of formal commercial data centers operated by cloud providers to include anyone interested in participating within the cloud services sharing economy. This in turn leads to more options, greater economies of scale, while bearing additional advantages for hosting data and computing services closer to the edge where they may be needed most.
