Self-Organized File System For Mobile Devices

Objectives

The issue of limited user space is important for all mobile devices today. Any user want to use a lot of content but don't want to pay for expensive large-volume cards to store it.

So the opportunity to share data in the ad-hoc network of mobile devices is very attractive.
Imagine that the data is distributed transparently among the net instead of being stored locally on each device. Any user can use any data in this net but has to store only the part locally.

So the idea of the project is to provide ability to use much more data on device with lack of user space by distributing data among the group of such devices in assumption that they supports networking and the sets of needed data are overlapped inside this group.

We suggest to develop serverless distributed file system to provide way to distribute data among the net of Nokia Interner Tablets, to use and to modify it remotely and so on.

Implementation

We suppose to use some base conceptions of serverless distribution used in xfs file system as the heart of implementation.
As the first step this file system can be implemented as a user-space programm using the Fuse (File System in User Space) software.
The developed file system has to provide common file operations along with procedures of connecting/disconnecting to the "data community", of locating newly created data, and relocating data in the case of unbalanced usage of space among the net.

Timeline

1. Proof the concept and establish requirements: obtain common use cases, review related works, identify platform constraints. - 30/12/08
2. Design and spec. - 01/02/09
3. First prototipe implementation - 01/03/09
4. First port for maemo - 15/03/09
5. Investigation, estimation of achievements, planning for next iterations - 15/04/09
6. Public report in FRUCT seminar (April 2009)

Contacts

Project Lead: Evelina Stepanova