Adaptive neighborhood selection in peer-to-peer networks based on content similarity and reputation

To address the two most critical issues in P2P file-sharing systems: efficient information discovery and authentic data acquisition, we propose a Gnutella-like file-sharing protocol termed Adaptive Gnutella Protocol (AGP) that not only improves the querying efficiency in a P2P network but also enhances the quality of search results at the same time. The reputation scheme in the proposed AGP evaluates the credibility of peers based on their contributions to P2P services and subsequently clusters nodes together according to their reputation and shared content, essentially transforming the P2P overlay network into a topology with collaborative and reputed nodes as its core. By detecting malicious peers as well as free-riders and eventually pushing them to the edge of the overlay network, our AGP propagates search queries mainly within the core of the topology, accelerating the information discovery process. Furthermore, the clustering of nodes based on authentic and similar content in our AGP also improves the quality of search results. We have implemented the AGP with the PeerSim simulation engine and conducted thorough experiments on diverse network topologies and various mixtures of honest/dishonest nodes to demonstrate improvements in topology transformation, query efficiency, and search quality by our AGP.

Alex DelisEmail:

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Ioannis Pogkas   received his BS in Computer Science in 2007 and is currently pursuing postgraduate studies at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the Univesrity of Athens. His research interests focus on search, reputation andtopology adaptation mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks. He is also interested in embedded and operating systems. Vassil Kriakov   received his B.S. and M.S. from Polytechnic University in 2001 and is now completing his doctoral studies at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). His PhD research has been partially sponsored by a US Department of Education GAANN Graduate Fellowship. His research interests include distributed spatio-temporal data indexing, correlations in high-frequency data streams, and data management in grid and peer-to-peer networks. Zhongqiang Chen   is a senior software engineer at Yahoo! He holds a PhD in Computer Science and MS degrees in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering all from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY. He is a Computer Engineering MS and BS graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. He is interested in network security, information retrieval, and distributed computing and is the recipient of the 2004 Wilkes Award for outstanding paper contribution in The Computer Journal. Alex Delis   is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Athens. He holds a PhD and an MS from the University of Maryland College Park as well as a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. His research interests are in distributed computing systems, networked information systems, databases and information security. He is a member of IEEE Computer Society, the ACM and the Technical Chamber of Greece.