In this thesis, we tackle the problem of content delivery and user collaboration with emerging Internet technologies. Our investigation starts from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing with social relations to contemporary cloud computing with flexible resource provisioning. We seek to leverage distributed resources for efficient sharing and collaboration, which leads to a hybrid system design that seamlessly bridges usersu27 local resources to public datacenters. We first explore social-network-based optimizations inpeer-to-peer content delivery. We give solid evidences that long-term social relations can be found and applied to enhance the sharing efficiency in peer-to-peer networks, and present practical implementation strategies for the popular BitTorrent system. We then investigate the performance of cloud-based file synchronization applications and identify the bottlenecks in their system design, in particular, the task interferences. We propose an interference-aware provisioning algorithm, which effectively mitigates the problem. We further examine the usersu27 interactions in state-of-the-art cloud-based distributed interactive applications. We find that, despite the benefit in terms of cost savings and better scalability, the cloud-based deployment greatly increases the usersu27 interaction latency. We demonstrate that a smart assignment algorithms for virtual machines can remarkably reduce such latency. Finally, we present a real-world system design that effectively bridges usersu27 local resources to enterprise cloud platforms. Our measurements as well as system analysis indicate that it serves as a complement of great potentials to enterprise cloud services.
展开▼
