SocialDNS: A decentralized naming service for collaborative P2P VPNs

The ability to define domain names for resources in a collaborative virtual organization is usually reserved to network administrators through centralized domain name servers. We propose SocialDNS, a decentralized, naming service that gives individual collaborators the power to choose the domain names for their resources. Our approach is based on similar concepts of decentralized naming solutions available in local area networks. We enable short-names for resources by limiting the scope for uniqueness. We also employ a rank-based mechanism for dealing with name conflicts. We evaluate our design through graph level analysis to anticipate scope, bandwidth costs and latency. We also conducted experiments involving Amazon EC2 and PlanetLab to analyze the latencies in a real world environment.