EMMP :a highly efficient membership management protocol

Gossip (or epidemic) algorithms have recently become popular solutions to multicast message dissemination in peer-to-peer systems. Nevertheless, it is not straightforward to apply gossip to on-demand streaming because it often fails to achieve a timely delivery. To solve this problem and taking into account the characteristic of peers randomly joining and leaving in peer-to-peer systems, an Efficient Membership Management Protocol (EMMP) has been presented. Every node only needs to keep contact with O (log(N)) nodes, and EMMP can support the reliable dissemination of messages. Considering the “distance” between peers, it causes the major data to be transmitted in a local area and reduces the backbone’s traffic, and speeds up the dissemination of messages between peers. This paper has adopted the “goodfriend” mechanism to reduce the influence on the system when a peer fails or leaves. Simulation results show that EMMP is highly efficient, and both the redundancy and the delay of the system are well solved.     

A performance evaluation of scalable live video streaming with nano data centers

To improve the efficiency and the quality of a service, a network operator may consider deploying a peer-to-peer architecture among controlled peers, also called here nano data centers, which contrast with the churn and resource heterogeneity of peers in uncontrolled environments. In this paper, we consider a prevalent peer-to-peer application: live video streaming. We demonstrate how nano data centers can take advantage of the self-scaling property of a peer-to-peer architecture, while significantly improving the quality of a live video streaming service, allowing smaller delays and fast channel switching. We introduce the branching architecture for nano datacenters (BAND), where a user can “pull” content from a channel of interest, or content could be “pushed” to it for relaying to other interested users. We prove that there exists an optimal trade-off point between minimizing the number of push, or the number of relaying nodes, and maintaining a robust topology as the number of channels and users get large, which allows scalability. We analyze the performance of content dissemination as users switch between channels, creating migration of nodes in the tree, while flow control insures continuity of data transmission. We prove that this p2p architecture guarantees a throughput independently of the size of the group. Analysis and evaluation of the model demonstrate that pushing content to a small number of relay nodes can have significant performance gains in throughput, start-up time, playback lags and channel switching delays.     

Chord2: A two-layer Chord for reducing maintenance overhead via heterogeneity

Empirical studies have shown that participating nodes in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are not equivalent. Some nodes, known as “super peers”, are more powerful and stable than the others. Such heterogeneity has been taken into account in the design of P2P systems in two ways: by employing super peers to serve as index servers for query, and by routing through super peers to speed up query. In this paper, we use super peers to reduce maintenance cost in Chord—a DHT network which, like other DHT-based systems, is often praised for its guaranteed search feature but has relatively higher maintenance overhead than Gnutella-like unstructured P2P networks.     

一种基于本地聚类的P2P资源查找算法*

资源检索是P2P系统研究的热点之一,非结构化P2P资源查找普遍采用泛洪机制。随着查询请求的增加,消息数量呈指数增长,网络拥塞和带宽浪费严重,查询效率得不到保障。针对这一问题,给出了一种基于本地聚类的非结构化P2P资源查找算法。通过对资源特征向量的本地Kmeans聚类和相似链接的建立,有效地提高了资源检索效率,避免了查询消息的扩散对网络带宽的浪费。实验表明,该方法能有效缩短资源的平均检索长度,提高查找成功率。     

A dynamic coalition formation game for search efficient adaptive overlay construction in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

A great number of recent works deal with improving search in peer-to-peer systems, specifically by clustering peers into semantic groups. When the process of clustering is predetermined and static, it suffers from lack of adaptation to highly dynamic peer-to-peer environments. We model the problem as a non-superadditive coalition game with non-transferable utility characteristic function, and propose a distributed dynamic coalition formation algorithm through myopic best-reply with experiment rule to solve the coalition formation problem. Coalitions are formed by peers with similar interests considering geographical proximity. The overlay network is dynamically reconfigured over time based on the changes in the interests or locations of the individual peers. The convergence of the proposed algorithm using “core solution” concept is studied. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce the search time, although the overhead of the overlay adaptation is slightly higher.     

Measuring and analyzing the characteristics of Napster and Gnutella hosts

The popularity of peer-to-peer multimedia file sharing applications such as Gnutella and Napster has created a flurry of recent research activity into peer-to-peer architectures. We believe that the proper evaluation of a peer-to-peer system must take into account the characteristics of the peers that choose to participate in it. Surprisingly, however, few of the peer-to-peer architectures currently being developed are evaluated with respect to such considerations. In this paper, we remedy this situation by performing a detailed measurement study of the two popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, namely Napster and Gnutella. In particular, our measurement study seeks to characterize the population of end-user hosts that participate in these two systems. This characterization includes the bottleneck bandwidths between these hosts and the Internet at large, IP-level latencies to send packets to these hosts, how often hosts connect and disconnect from the system, how many files hosts share and download, the degree of cooperation between the hosts, and several correlations between these characteristics. Our measurements show that there is significant heterogeneity and lack of cooperation across peers participating in these systems.     

A mechanism that provides incentives for truthful feedback in peer-to-peer systems

We propose a mechanism for providing the incentives for reporting truthful feedback in a peer-to-peer system for exchanging services (or content). This mechanism is to complement reputation mechanisms that employ ratings’ feedback on the various transactions in order to provide incentives to peers for offering better services to others. Under our approach, each of the transacting peers (rather than just the client) submits a rating on the performance of their mutual transaction. If these are in disagreement, then both transacting peers are punished, since such an occasion is a sign that one of them is lying. The severity of each peer’s punishment is determined by his corresponding non-credibility metric; this is maintained by the mechanism and evolves according to the peer’s record. When under punishment, a peer does not transact with others. We model the punishment effect of the mechanism in a peer-to-peer system as a Markov chain that is experimentally proved to be very accurate. According to this model, the credibility mechanism leads the peer-to-peer system to a desirable steady state isolating liars. Then, we define a procedure for the optimization of the punishment parameters of the mechanism for peer-to-peer systems of various characteristics. We experimentally prove that this optimization procedure is effective and necessary for the successful employment of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems. Then, the optimized credibility mechanism is combined with reputation-based policies to provide a complete solution for high performance and truthful rating in peer-to-peer systems. The combined mechanism was experimentally proved to deal very effectively with large fractions of collaborated liar peers that follow static or dynamic rational lying strategies in peer-to-peer systems with dynamically renewed population, while the efficiency loss induced to sincere peers by the presence of liars is diminished. Finally, we describe the potential implementation of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems.     

DCMP: A Distributed Cycle Minimization Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Broadcast-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, including flat (for example, Gnutella) and two-layer superpeer implementations (for example, Kazaa), are extremely popular nowadays due to their simplicity, ease of deployment, and versatility. The unstructured network topology, however, contains many cyclic paths, which introduce numerous duplicate messages in the system. Although such messages can be identified and ignored, they still consume a large proportion of the bandwidth and other resources, causing bottlenecks in the entire network. In this paper, we describe the distributed cycle minimization protocol (DCMP), a dynamic fully decentralized protocol that significantly reduces the duplicate messages by eliminating unnecessary cycles. As queries are transmitted through the peers, DCMP identifies the problematic paths and attempts to break the cycles while maintaining the connectivity of the network. In order to preserve the fault resilience and load balancing properties of unstructured P2P systems, DCMP avoids creating a hierarchical organization. Instead, it applies cycle elimination symmetrically around some powerful peers to keep the average path length small. The overall structure is constructed fast with very low overhead. With the information collected during this process, distributed maintenance is performed efficiently even if peers quit the system without notification. The experimental results from our simulator and the prototype implementation on PlanetLab confirm that DCMP significantly improves the scalability of unstructured P2P systems without sacrificing their desirable properties. Moreover, due to its simplicity, DCMP can be easily implemented in various existing P2P systems and is orthogonal to the search algorithms.     

Tornado: a capability-aware peer-to-peer storage overlay

Peer-to-peer storage networks aim at aggregating the storage in today's resource-abundant computers to form a large, shared storage space. With the extreme heterogeneity in machines, networks and administrative organizations over which such networks are laid, peer-to-peer storage networks must be aware of the capabilities of the constituent components to leverage their resources, performance and reliability. This paper reports our design of such a peer-to-peer storage network called Tornado. Tornado is built on top of three concepts. The first is the virtual home concept, which designates each data item in Tornado to a virtual home instead of directly to a peer node. The second concept is node autonomy, which allows each peer node to determine the number of virtual homes it intends to host according to its computational capability. The third concept is quality classification, which classifies the peer nodes into “good” and “bad” according to their static and dynamic capabilities. Only “good” peers can host virtual homes, whereby leveraging the reliability and capabilities of these peers. When a good peer becomes overloaded, Tornado seeks another good but inactive peer to relieve the load.     

Multipath Dissemination in Regular Mesh Topologies

Mesh topologies are important for large-scale peer-to-peer systems that use low-power transceivers. The Quality of Service (QoS) in such systems is known to decrease as the scale increases. We present a scalable approach for dissemination that exploits all the shortest paths between a pair of nodes and improves the QoS. Despite the presence of multiple shortest paths in a system, we show that these paths cannot be exploited by spreading the messages over the paths in a simple round-robin manner; nodes along one of these paths will always handle more messages than the nodes along the other paths. We characterize the set of shortest paths between a pair of nodes in regular mesh topologies and derive rules, using this characterization, to effectively spread the messages over all the available paths. These rules ensure that all the nodes that are at the same distance from the source handle roughly the same number of messages. By modeling the multihop propagation in the mesh topology as a multistage queuing network, we present simulation results from a variety of scenarios that include link failures and propagation irregularities to reflect real-world characteristics. Our method achieves improved QoS in all these scenarios.     

Measurement-based study on the relation between users’ watching behavior and network sharing in P2P VoD systems

P2P-based Video on Demand (P2P VoD) systems can provide higher quality video services than P2P live systems. However, owing to the unavailability of open source codes, the characteristics of P2P VoD systems have not been fully explored. For this purpose, in this paper, we first implemented reverse engineering to the protocols of two most popular VoD systems used in China. Peers’ watching behavior and network sharing were then studied through the measured buffer messages. Based on our study, we found that uploading-only peers were more than downloading peers, and smooth-watching peers were more than randomly-seeking peers in the current P2P VoD systems. This finding is significantly different from the existing P2P-based file dissemination systems and the results obtained in the previous work on VoD systems. Furthermore, this study revealed the relations between watching behavior and network sharing. It has been observed that randomly-seeking peers will provide more regular as well as rare chunks than smooth-watching peers. A simple mathematical model was established to analytically demonstrate the relation between the watching index (WI) distribution and network-sharing profile, and this relation was also validated by our measured data.     

对等网络信任度分布式存储的研究

利用结构化对等网络的优点,由网络中的部分节点组成结构化的叠加网络来储存节点信任度的多个拷贝,并提出了节点信任度的加密报告机制和简单的报告消息验证方法,抵抗恶意节点篡改自己或同伙的推荐的企图.这种方法能够在进行全局信任度计算时,将离开系统的节点的评价纳入考虑的范围,并保证在需要使用信任度值时,确定的有限步内找到信任度文件.     

Reusing ontology mappings for query routing in semantic peer-to-peer environment

To efficiently support automated interoperability between ontology-based information systems in distributed environments, the semantic heterogeneity problem has to be dealt with. To do so, traditional approaches have acquired and employed explicit mappings between the corresponding ontologies. Usually these mappings can be only obtained from human domain experts. However, it is too expensive and time-consuming to collect all possible mapping results on distributed information systems. More seriously, as the number of systems in a large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) network increases, the efficiency of the ontology mapping is exponentially decreased. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a novel semantic P2P system, which is capable of (i) sharing and exchanging existing mappings among peers, and (ii) composing shared mappings to build a certain path between two systems. Given two arbitrary peers (i.e., source and destination), the proposed system can provide indirect ontology mappings to make them interoperable. In particular, we have focused on query-based communication for evaluating the proposed ontology mapping composition system. Once direct ontology mappings are collected from candidate peers, a given query can be (i) segmented into a set of sub-queries, and (ii) transformed to another query. With respect to the precision performance, our experimentation has shown an improvement of about 42.5% compared to the keyword-based query searching method.     

Resource allocation in peer-to-peer networks

Resource allocation in peer-to-peer networks — An excess-based economic model This paper describes economic aspects of GNUnet, a peer-to-peer framework for anonymous distributed file-sharing. GNUnet is decentralized; all nodes are equal peers. In particular, there are no trusted entities in the network. This paper describes an economic model to perform resource allocation and defend against malicious participants in this context. The approach presented does not use credentials or payments; rather, it is based on trust. The design is much like that of a cooperative game in which peers take the role of players. Nodes must cooperate to achieve individual goals. In such a scenario, it is important to be able to distinguish between nodes exhibiting friendly behavior and those exhibiting malicious behavior. GNUnet aims to provide anonymity for its users. Its design makes it hard to link a transaction to the node where it originated from. While anonymity requirements make a global view of the end-points of a transaction infeasible, the local link-to-link messages can be fully authenticated. Our economic model is based entirely on this local view of the network and takes only local decisions.     

一种非结构化对等网络短路效应解决方法

非结构化对等网络Gnutella存在短路效应，这会严重影响消息的到达率，造成网络查询效率低下。利用Gnutella网络拓扑的分布呈现典型的幂规律和小世界特性，将少量度很大的节点提升为超级结点，并以超级节点为中心，将兴趣相同或相似的节点进行聚类，从而形成若干自治域小世界，这样Gnutella网络模型被抽象层次化，自治域内查询请求由本域的超级节点直接处理，自治域间查询请求在超级节点间进行转发。研究表明，这种方法可以有效解决短路效应问题。     

Dealing with network partitions in structured overlay networks

Structured overlay networks form a major class of peer-to-peer systems, which are touted for their abilities to scale, tolerate failures, and self-manage. Any long-lived Internet-scale distributed system is destined to face network partitions. Although the problem of network partitions and mergers is highly related to fault-tolerance and self-management in large-scale systems, it has hardly been studied in the context of structured peer-to-peer systems. These systems have mainly been studied under churn (frequent joins/failures), which as a side effect solves the problem of network partitions, as it is similar to massive node failures. Yet, the crucial aspect of network mergers has been ignored. In fact, it has been claimed that ring-based structured overlay networks, which constitute the majority of the structured overlays, are intrinsically ill-suited for merging rings. In this paper, we present an algorithm for merging multiple similar ring-based overlays when the underlying network merges. We examine the solution in dynamic conditions, showing how our solution is resilient to churn during the merger, something widely believed to be difficult or impossible. We evaluate the algorithm for various scenarios and show that even when falsely detecting a merger, the algorithm quickly terminates and does not clutter the network with many messages. The algorithm is flexible as the tradeoff between message complexity and time complexity can be adjusted by a parameter.     

Reducing query overhead through route learning in unstructured peer-to-peer network

In unstructured peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella, peers propagate query messages towards the resource holders by flooding them through the network. This is, however, a costly operation since it consumes node and link resources excessively and often unnecessarily. There is no reason, for example, for a peer to receive a query message if the peer has no matching resource or is not on the path to a peer holding a matching resource. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem, which we call Route Learning, aiming to reduce query traffic in unstructured peer-to-peer networks. In Route Learning, peers try to identify the most likely neighbors through which replies can be obtained to submitted queries. In this way, a query is forwarded only to a subset of the neighbors of a peer, or it is dropped if no neighbor, likely to reply, is found. The scheme also has mechanisms to cope with variations in user submitted queries, like changes in the keywords. The scheme can also evaluate the route for a query for which it is not trained. We show through simulation results that when compared to a pure flooding based querying approach, our scheme reduces bandwidth overhead significantly without sacrificing user satisfaction.     

Efficient Multimedia Distribution in Source Constraint Networks

In recent years, the number of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications has increased significantly. One important problem in many P2P applications is how to efficiently disseminate data from a single source to multiple receivers on the Internet. A successful model used for analyzing this problem is a graph consisting of nodes and edges, with a capacity assigned to each edge. In some situations however, it is inconvenient to use this model. To that end, we propose to study the problem of efficient data dissemination in a source constraint network. A source constraint network is modeled as a graph in which, the capacity is associated with a node, rather than an edge. The contributions of this paper include (a) a quantitative data dissemination in any source constraint network, (b) a set of topologies suitable for data dissemination in P2P networks, and (c) an architecture and implementation of a P2P system based on the proposed optimal topologies. We will present the experimental results of our P2P system deployed on PlanetLab nodes demonstrating that our approach achieves near optimal throughput while providing scalability, low delay and bandwidth fairness among peers.     

Principles and performance analysis of SeCond: A system for epidemic peer-to-peer content distribution

We propose and design a peer-to-peer system, SeCond, addressing the distribution of large sized content to a large number of end systems in an efficient manner. In contrast to prior work, it employs a self-organizing epidemic dissemination scheme for state propagation of available blocks and initiation of block transmissions. In order to exploit heterogeneity of peers, enhance the utilization of system resources and for the ease of deployment, scalability, and adaptivity to dynamic peer arrivals/departures, we propose mechanisms for adjusting protocol parameters dynamically according to the bandwidth usages. We describe design and analysis details of our protocol SeCond. Comprehensive performance evaluations and comparison with the BitTorrent system model have been accomplished for a wide range of scenarios. Performance results include scalability analysis for different arrival/departure patterns, flash-crowd scenario, overhead analysis, and fairness ratio. The major metrics we study include the average file download time, load on the primary seed, uplink/downlink utilization, and communication overhead. We show that SeCond is a scalable and adaptive protocol which takes the heterogeneity of the peers into account. The protocol is as fair as BitTorrent although it has no explicit strategy addressing free-riding. We also illustrate the applicability of an analytical fluid model to the behavior of SeCond.     

Topological Implications of Selfish Neighbor Selection in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Current peer-to-peer (P2P) systems often suffer from a large fraction of freeriders not contributing any resources to the network. Various mechanisms have been designed to overcome this problem. However, the selfish behavior of peers has aspects which go beyond resource sharing. This paper studies the effects on the topology of a P2P network if peers selfishly select the peers to connect to. In our model, a peer exploits locality properties in order to minimize the latency (or response times) of its lookup operations. At the same time, the peer aims at not having to maintain links to too many other peers in the system. By giving tight bounds on the price of anarchy, we show that the resulting topologies can be much worse than if peers collaborated. Moreover, the network may never stabilize, even in the absence of churn. Finally, we establish the complexity of Nash equilibria in our game theoretic model of P2P networks. Specifically, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether our game has a Nash equilibrium and can stabilize.