Local peer-to-peer mobile access to linked data in resource-constrained networks

Overview & Synopsis

Access to the Web of Data is nowadays of real interest for research, mainly in the sense that the clients consuming or processing this data are more and more numerous and have various specificities (mobility, Internet, autonomy, storage, etc.). Tools such as Web applications, search engines, e-learning platforms, etc., exploit the Web of Data to offer end-users services that contribute to the improvement of daily activities. In this context, we are working on Web of Data access, considering constraints such as customer mobility and intermittent availability of the Internet connection. We are interested in mobility as our work is oriented towards end-users with mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. The intermittency of Internet connection refers herein to scenarios of unavailability of national or international links that make remote data sources inaccessible. We target a scenario where users form a peer-to-peer network such that anyone can generate information and make it available to everyone else on the network. Thus, we survey and compare several solutions (models, architectures,etc.) dedicated to Web of Data access by mobile contributors and discussed in relation to the underlying network architectures and data models considered. We present a conceptual study of peer-to-peer solutions based on gossip protocols dedicated to design the connected overlay networks and present a detailed analysis of data replication systems whose general objective is to ensure a system’s local data availability. On the basis of this work, we proposed an architecture adapted to constraining environments and allowing mobile contributors to share locally, via a browser network, an RDF dataset. The architecture consists of 3 levels: single peers, super peers and remote sources. Two main axes are considered for the implementation of this architecture: firstly the construction and maintenance of connectivity ensured by the gossip protocol, and secondly the high availability of data ensured by a replication mechanism. Our approach has the particularity to consider the location of each participant’s neighbours to increase the search perimeter and to integrate super-peers on which the data graph is replicated allowing data availability improvement. We finally carried out an experimental evaluation of our architecture through extensive simulation configured to capture key aspects of our motivating scenario of supporting data exchange between the participants of a local event.