Remembering the Future

Newswire is a peer-to-peer, fully decentralized system that brings news to your desktop, within seconds after it is published. This technology gives the community the power to weave a collaborative infrastructure for the delivery of essential information to individuals in a robust, scalable and secure way. Newswire is a survivable system which will deliver news to subscribers even if large parts of the infrastructure are under attack or stress.

. . .

Newswire consist of a set of software components packaged as a single application. The main application functionality allows the user to subscribe to a potentially large number of publishers, and to receive (short) messages from these publishers. The message content may range from complete articles to short descriptions with links, similar to the individual entries in RSS feeds.

. . .

At the core is epidemic communication and state management to maintain distributed knowledge about subscriptions, participant network capabilities and forwarding load. The epidemic technology was first developed by Alan Demers and friends at PARC, but has been completely revised at Cornell in the past years

The structuring into zones and virtual hierarchies is based on the small worlds phenomenon. When you organize participants into small groups of local participants with some knowledge of other remote nodes you can construct very effective routes in a decentralized, autonomous manner.

These technologies are used to build a loosely coupled, dynamic overlay network, that continuously monitors network load and capacities to achieve a fair load.

Topics: Architecture