Wayfinder: navigating and sharing information in a decentralized world

Social networks offering unprecedented content sharing are rapidly developing over the Internet. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to both locate and manage content in these networks, particularly when they are implemented on current peer-to-peer technologies. In this paper, we describe Wayfinder, a peer-to-peer file system that targets the needs of medium-sized content sharing communities. Wayfinder seeks to advance the state-of-the-art by providing three synergistic abstractions: a global namespace that is uniformly accessible across connected and disconnected operation, content-based queries that can be persistently embedded into the global namespace, and automatic availability management. Interestingly, Wayfinder achieves much of its functionality through the use of a peer-to-peer indexed data storage system called PlanetP: essentially, Wayfinder constructs the global namespace, locates specific files, and performs content searches by posing appropriate queries to PlanetP. We describe this query-based design and present preliminary performance measurements of a prototype implementation.