The Internet Backplane Protocol: Shared Storage for Enhanced Network Infrastructure

Presented here are results pertaining to the utilization of distributed shared storage infrastructure to facilitate application management of remote state. The proposed infrastructure relies on non-privileged storage servers deployed by users at various location in the network. Applications utilize network topology information and storage servers profiles to develop and deploy data access and movement policies that enhance application performance and/or functionality. The combined management of storage and communication resources afforded by the proposed model enable a wide array of new applications that depart from the end-to-end model at the core of the existing Internet. However, this departure is done at a high enough level such that it doesn't compromise the advantages of the end-to-end model at lower levels in the communication protocol stack that are essential for network scalability. The proposed model enables locality-aware applications to improve overall resource utilization through execution policies that take into consideration data locality, storage availability at various locations, and communication bandwidth available. The major result of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the combined management of remote network storage and communication bandwidth information enhances the functionality and/or performance or certain classes of distributed network applications.