Monday, March 9, 2009

A Hybrid Mesh Network: Path to a Distributed Secure Social Grid Network

After a rigorous weekend of coding and searching for code, I am quickly coming up with a model that can specifically express most of the ideas of a distributable secure social grid network. On Saturday morning I was reviewing some of my detailed thought experiments relating to “What would it take to create an infinitely scalable distributed social network”. Reading through the thoughts here it can be easily seen how that consideration is not only relevant but paramount from the perspective of supporting the expanding boundary conditions that a health care network will demand. So to that end, I began to review the types of physical networks that can support that type of environment and came up with the idea of basing my ideas on a Hybrid Mesh Network that will leverage two Networking sub-models: Fully Connected Topology (Point-to-Point) and Star Topology (Hub and Spoke). These topologies take into account three of the most important expressions of a Grid Node’s ability to connect and participate in the network which are:

  • A Consumer Grid Node – this node is consuming services/applications, vocabularies and autonomously exchanging data with “N” number of other nodes
  • A Producer Grid Node – this node is providing services/applications, vocabularies and autonomously exchanging data with “N” number of other nodes
  • A Producer/Consumer Grid Node – this node is providing services/application and vocabularies to some nodes while consuming services/applications to other nodes and autonomously exchanging data with all.

In all three cases, the incorporated PKI for credential management and access control will need to encompass direct control and delegated security models. Considering deployment requirements now, will make a solution that much more adoptable by a broad range of organizations because it is conforming to some of their deployment best practices. For leisure reading I took a look at this document ,I think it provides a good guidance in regards to a Producer or the Producer/Consumer DMZ deployment best practices. Thoughts? Until next time…..

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Simultaneoulsy interesting and entertaining...good job!