A Peer-To-Peer-based Storage Platform for Storing Session Data in Internet Access Networks

Abstract:
Internet service providers (ISPs) have to store session data of their customers for operation, management, and control tasks. Thereby, each access node (AN) of an ISP’s access network keeps track of session data (e.g., IP addresses, MAC addresses, and lease times of IP addresses) of all connected customers. Session data is highly volatile due to continuous changes. It has to be stored persistently as it is required for regular data forwarding and traffic filtering. In case of an AN’s restart or crash, it needs to be reloaded. Today, session data is stored in an AN’s flash memory, which is limited in its availability and rewritability and intended for other purposes. Therefore, this paper proposes to organize ANs into a distributed hash table (DHT)-based Peer-to-Peer network to share their available RAM resources. Thereby, the DHT network serves as semi-permanent distributed memory for a structured redundant and interleaved storage of session data. In doing so, availability of session data is actually increased despite using RAM for data storage. After a restart or crash, an AN reloads session data by selectively reading required data from the DHT network.