The Design And Performance Analysis Of Parasitic Storage System

With the rapid development of Internet, mass of communication and computing resources spread all over it. This brings a question: Can the idle resources over the network be used to implement dynamic data storage? The Internet has a momentary storage capacity in the process of sending data packages to remote systems and receiving the echoed ones. As the time of the data package traveling on network is nonzero, this causes the traveling data to be sustained online in a certain period of time and achieves an actual data storage, which can be taken as an extremely unusual network storage mode, parasitic storage, naturally.Inspired by this thought, an extremely unusual storage model based on existing Internet protocols, such as ICMP, SMTP and etc, can be achieved. It uses the communicating mechanism of standard protocol to exploit the storage potential of network communications. By analyzing the protocol's own characteristics, the protocols and environments suitable for parasitic storage are explored in detail.An ICMP-based parasitic storage model is established. The detailed design of model is given out and typical performances, such as storage capacity, I/O speed, and life-cycle are analyzed. The analysis results show that: the capacity is influenced by communication channel delay and the number of hosts; I/O speed is affected by bandwidth of the initiator; and the life-cycle is determined by the number of redundant and packets loss rate of network. Furthermore, the entire Internet storage capacity is estimated. The results of experiments indicates that the storage method is applicable for free of cost, large space and short term data storage over wide area network without being sensed by remote hosts (i.e.parasitifers), and also it does no harm to the hosts and the influence on network can be ignored.