PosCFS+: A self-managed file service in personal area network

Abstract

Wearable computers consisting of various small devices such as smart phones, digital cameras, MP3 players and specialized I/O devices in personal area networks will play an important role in future ubiquitous computing. In this environment, accessing user data is quite complex due to the dynamic and heterogeneous characteristics of the underlying networks. Moreover, since the amount of user data increases rapidly, automatic data backup management is also critical. To overcome these challenges, several studies have been conducted including our previously proposed file service system, PosCFS, which could be adapted to the requirements with a virtualization technique allowing per-user global namespace for managing and accessing data stored on physical storage spaces detected in PAN. In this paper, we present a smart file service framework, PosCFS+ which is an improved and extended version of our previous work. Performance improvement is made possible by redesigning the metadata management scheme based on database and keywords rather than ontology. In addition, the automatic data replication management is newly designed based on the OSD protocol.