User-Relative Names for Globally Connected Personal Devices
Bryan Ford, Jacob Strauss, Chris Lesniewski-Laas,
Sean Rhea, Frans Kaashoek, and Robert Morris
Abstract
Nontechnical users
who own increasingly ubiquitous network-enabled personal devices
such as laptops, digital cameras, and smart phones
need a simple, intuitive, and secure way
to share information and services
between their devices.
User Information Architecture, or UIA,
is a novel naming and peer-to-peer connectivity architecture
addressing this need.
Users assign UIA names
by "introducing" devices to each other on a common local-area network,
but these names remain securely bound to their target as devices migrate.
Multiple devices owned by the same user,
once introduced,
automatically merge their namespaces
to form a distributed personal cluster
that the owner can access or modify from any of his devices.
Instead of requiring users to allocate globally unique names
from a central authority,
UIA enables users to assign their own user-relative names
both to their own devices and to other users.
With UIA, for example,
Alice can always access her iPod from any of her own personal devices
at any location
via the name ipod,
and her friend Bob can access her iPod
via a relative name like ipod.Alice.
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