Putting Home Storage Management into Perspective (CMU-PDL-06-110)

Perspective is a decentralized data management system for the growing collection of consumer electronics that store and access digital content. Perspective uses a new construct, called the view, to concisely describe which data objects each device may store and access. By knowing the views in the system, a device can know which devices may need to hear about any particular update and which devices to contact for a particular search query. By exchanging views, an ensemble of devices can coordinate and share data efficiently without relying on a centralized server; it works the same in the home or for a subset of devices outside the home. Experiments with Perspective confirm that views improve ensemble creation and search performance, by avoiding costs that are linear in the number of objects stored, without penalizing performance relative to an ideal centralized server setup.