Locality-Awareness in BitTorrent-Like P2P Applications

This paper presents the measurement study of locality-aware P2P solutions over real-world Internet autonomous systems (AS) topology. By using the accesses of nodes of PlanetLab testbed, we create a detailed AS-level map including the end-to-end path of all nodes, as well as the relationship of all involved ASes. Based on this map, we evaluate the performance of a set of locality-aware P2P solutions, including an optimal solution guaranteeing the minimum AS hop count, as well as modified BitTorrent system with locality-awareness built into its neighbor selection, peer choking/unchoking, and piece selection processes. Our findings suggest that locality-awareness can help existing P2P solution to significantly decrease load on Internet, and achieve shorter downloading time. By comparing the performance of different kinds of locality-aware and traditional BitTorrent systems, we also point out the necessity to tradeoff between the goals of optimizing AS-related performance and achieving fairness among peers such as intra-AS traffic and peer burden fairness.      

Reward only is not enough: Evaluating and improving the fairness policy of the P2P file sharing network eMule/eDonkey

Limiting the threat of free-riding behavior is an important design issue for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. However, the fairness policy that rewards contributors with credit in one of the most popular P2P file sharing networks, eMule/eDonkey, hasn’t been thoroughly studied. In this paper, motivated by our experiments with the eMule/eDonkey network, we firstly theoretically analyze the content exchange process with credit in eMule/eDonkey and then verify the mathematical model by an agent-based simulation. Both the numerical and simulation-based results confirm our discovery in the experiments that eMule/eDonkey’s local credit strategy can not provide enough fairness as it doesn’t explicitly punish free-riders. To overcome this drawback, we propose a new free-riding control scheme, which can simply maintain the current credit local structure and take advantage of the credit policy. Extensive numerical evaluation and simulation indicate that this scheme significantly improves system fairness.     

Performance evaluation of a Kademlia-based communication-oriented P2P system under churn

The phenomenon of churn has a significant effect on the performance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, especially in mobile environments that are characterized by intermittent connections and unguaranteed network bandwidths. A number of proposals have been put forward to deal with this problem; however, we have so far not seen any thorough analysis to guide the optimal design choices and parameter configurations for structured P2P networks. In this article, we present a performance evaluation of a structured communication-oriented P2P system in the presence of churn. The evaluation is conducted using both simulation models and a real-life prototype implementation. In both evaluation environments, we utilize Kademlia with some modifications as the underlying distributed hash table (DHT) algorithm, and Peer-to-Peer Protocol (P2PP) as the signaling protocol. The results from the simulation models created using Nethawk EAST (a telecommunication simulator software) suggest that, in most situations, a lookup parallelism degree of 3 and resource replication degree of 3 are enough for guaranteeing a high resource lookup success ratio. We also notice that, with the parallel lookup mechanism, a good success ratio is achieved even without the KeepAlive traffic that is used for detecting the aliveness of nodes. A prototype system that works in mobile environment is implemented to evaluate the feasibility of mobile nodes acting as full-fledged peers. The measurements made using the prototype show that, from the viewpoints of CPU load and network traffic load, it is feasible for the mobile nodes to take part in the overlay. Through energy consumption measurements, we draw the conclusion that in general the UMTS access mode consumes slightly more power than the WLAN access mode. Protocol packets with sizes of 200 bytes or less are observed to be the most energy efficient in the UMTS access mode.     

一种新型的P2P信息检索系统性能评估方法

对等计算作为学术界和工业界的关注焦点,其在实践中的重要应用主要是信息资源共享.但随着对等计算信息检索系统的广泛应用,如何对其进行客观公正的评价,确定有效、实用的评估标准已迫在眉睫.于是,在以上趋势背景下,文章经过详细研究分析对等计算的信息共享系统后,指出目前P2P信息检索系统面临的实现机制和关键技术问题.之后,经过认真总结和分析,勾勒出评价系统性能的四项指标体系,提出系统性能评估的CTL定律,这对P2P信息检索系统的评价和开发将具有实际指导意义.同时,在此基础上确定今后对等计算信息检索系统研究工作的重点--关键技术及其相应策略.     

P2P系统服务质量研究

随着P2P计算受到越来越多的关注,如何系统全面地对一个P2P系统作出评估成了一个非常重要的问题。本文从服务质量的角度来系统地考虑P2P系统评估的问题,提出了一个P2P系统服务质量度量框架,以帮助和指导P2P系统的设计和选择。     

非结构的P2P网络拓扑模型

在P2P系统中,物理主机的组网比较灵活.由于网络拓扑直接影响了网络的性能,所以构建什么样的对等网络拓扑一直备受关注.本文讨论几种常用的非结构对等网络拓扑模型.非结构型的对等网络适合信息发布类型的应用,其组网和维护相对简单.我们的研究发现,虽然目前有很多构建非结构型的对等网络的方案,但是这些方案最终构建的对等网络基本可以归为三种类型的拓扑模型, 随机图论模型(Erdős-Rényi),k规则随机图和随机有向图.本文分别描述了这三种拓扑模型的度分布、连通性和直径,以及一些相关的典型应用.     

Stochastic Optimization for Content Sharing in P2P Systems

Available resources in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems depend strongly on resource contributions made by individual peers. Empirical data shows that in the absence of incentives, a majority of the participating peers do not contribute resources. Modeling interactions between individual peers is often difficult as the number of peers in the system can be very large, and the relationships among them can be very complex. In this paper, we propose a new solution for P2P systems, where peers upload and download content to and from the contributing peers based on agreed-upon/determined sharing rates. We propose a P2P solution that deters free-riders by imposing constraints on participating peers; specifically, a peer is allowed access to new content only as long as its own content contribution exceeds an adaptively set threshold. The constraints are enforced either by a central authority (e.g., a tracker) or by a decentralized coalition of peers in a swarm, social network, etc. We derive optimal upload policies for the peers given their estimated future download requirements and their previous contribution (credit) to the other peers. Our results show considerable improvement in the cost-benefit tradeoff for peers that deploy such an optimal policy as compared to heuristic upload policies. We also propose mechanisms based on which the coalition of peers can provide incentives or penalties to participating peers to adjust their policies such that the availability of content and/or number of peers contributing content is maximized.     

P2P storage systems: Study of different placement policies

In a P2P storage system using erasure codes, a data block is encoded in many redundancy fragments. These fragments are then sent to distinct peers of the network. In this work, we study the impact of different placement policies of these fragments on the performance of storage systems. Several practical factors (easier control, software reuse, latency) tend to favor data placement strategies that preserve some degree of locality. We compare three policies: two of them are local, in which the data are stored in logical neighbors, and the other one, global, in which the data are spread randomly in the whole system. We focus on the study of the probability to lose a data block and the bandwidth consumption to maintain such redundancy. We use simulations to show that, without resource constraints, the average values are the same no matter which placement policy is used. However, the variations in the use of bandwidth are much more bursty under the local policies. When the bandwidth is limited, these bursty variations induce longer maintenance time and henceforth a higher risk of data loss. We then show that a suitable degree of locality could be introduced in order to combine the efficiency of the global policy with the practical advantages of a local placement. Additionally, we propose a new external reconstruction strategy that greatly improves the performance of local placement strategies. Finally, we give analytical methods to estimate the mean time to the occurrence of data loss for the three policies.     

Modeling and optimization of survivable P2P multicasting

Various solutions based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) multicasting have been gaining much popularity in recent years, since P2P multicasting can effectively support live streaming of various content. In this work we assume that the P2P multicasting is used to distribute content with high reliability requirements, e.g., weather warnings, security updates, financial data, security warnings, etc. The main idea to provide protection of the system against network failures is to establish several (at least two) disjoint multicasting trees. Our discussion in this paper centers on the problem how additional survivability constraints to provide failure-disjoint trees impact the operation of P2P multicasting systems. As the performance metrics we propose to use: streaming cost, maximum delay and throughput. The possible failure scenario we take into account is a single failure of one of the following network elements: streaming server, overlay link, uploading node and ISP link. We examine the topic of survivable P2P multicasting applying offline optimization methods and simulations. In the former case we formulate Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) models and use the CPLEX solver to obtain optimal results. For the streaming cost objective we compare two MIP formulations in terms of the complexity and execution time. Results show that our formulation provides much better performance compared to the classical P2P multicasting formulation proposed in the literature. Moreover, in the case of the streaming cost problem we propose a new evolutionary algorithm that yields results for larger networks than the CPLEX solver. The simulations are run to emulate a distributed network environment, in which each node makes its own decisions. Results obtained using both research methods confirm that the survivability of P2P multicasting can be achieved with relatively low additional system overhead for all three considered performance metrics: streaming cost, maximum delay and system throughput.     

Optimizing P2P streaming throughput under peer churning

High-throughput P2P streaming relies on peer selection, the strategy a peer uses to select other peer(s) as its parent(s) of streaming. Although this problem has been thoroughly investigated in the classical optimization framework under static settings, it still remains unaddressed as how to sustain throughput competitive to the optimum under highly dynamic peer churning. To accommodate such peer dynamics, we extend the classical optimization framework and propose a distributed online peer selection algorithm. This basic algorithm is further extended to a variety of settings commonly seen in operational P2P networks, such as multi-parent streaming, admission control, delay constraint, etc. We prove approximation bound of our algorithm to the optimal throughput. Through evaluation under different topological setups and peer churning sequences, we show that our solution can consistently deliver competitive throughput, which greatly outperforms its theoretical bound. This work was supported by NSF award 0643488, Vanderbilt Discovery grant, and a gift from Microsoft Research. Views and conclusions of this paper are those of authors, which should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the funding agencies.     

A framework for opportunistic scheduling in wireless networks

We present a method, called opportunistic scheduling, for exploiting the time-varying nature of the radio environment to increase the overall performance of the system under certain quality of service/fairness requirements of users. We first introduce a general framework for opportunistic scheduling, and then identify three general categories of scheduling problems under this framework. We provide optimal solutions for each of these scheduling problems. All the proposed scheduling policies are implementable online; we provide parameter estimation algorithms and implementation procedures for them. We also show how previous work by us and others directly fits into or is related to this framework. We demonstrate via simulation that opportunistic scheduling schemes result in significant performance improvement compared with non-opportunistic alternatives.     

C-trust: A trust management system to improve fairness on circular P2P networks

An important issue in Peer-to-Peer networks is to encourage users to share with others as they use the resources of the network. However, some nodes may only consume from users without giving anything in return. To fix this problem, we can incorporate trust management systems with network infrastructures. Current trust managements are usually made for unstructured overlays and have several shortcomings. They are made to be very similar to e-commerce scoring websites which may not be the best design for fairness in P2P networks. Several problems may arise with their designs such as difficulties to provide a complete history of freeloaders or lack of an autonomous removal mechanism in case of severe attacks. In this paper, we argue that such systems can be deployed more efficiently by using a structured paradigm. For this purpose, we propose C-Trust, a trust management system which is focused on fairness for P2P networks. This is done by getting help from current circular structured designs. This method is able to mark freeloaders, identify their severity of abusion and punish them accordingly. We are also able to effectively protect both Seeder-to-Leecher and Leecher-to-Leecher transactions. This feature is specially important for fairness which other trust systems have not considered so far.     

利用审计方式构建公平的对等文件共享系统

利用审计方式构建了一个公平的对等文件共享系统。该共享模式参考了市场经济的交易模型,结合了文件共享中的限额管理技术,通过描述节点的信任度信息让其能够存储更多的文件,使节点能够发布它的资源使用记录,其他的节点就可以通过某个功能来审计这些记录的情况,以保证交易的正确性和可追溯性,实现资源上传下载的公平性。描述了审计模型的工作机制和代价分析,构建了审计模型的测试环境,性能分析表明,在大量的节点和文件进行上传和下载的时候,系统具有比较小的通信延迟和良好的扩展性,优于同类的非审计模式。     

P2P应用系统设计平台研究

目前在对等网设计中存在一些问题:应用范围的多样性和设计应用系统的性能难于评估。这就需要对等网模拟器对其各项性能指标进行分析。本文针对这些问题结合蚁群算法对模拟器的设计思想进行了深入研究,并结合蚁群算法,针对对等网模拟器路由选择问题结合前人的研究提出一种新的设计方案。     

结构化P2P网络路由算法在网络层的性能评估

基于结构化P2P路由系统的马尔可夫链模型,以平均路径长度为指标,提出了结构化P2P网络路由算法在网络层面的性能量化评估方法。该方法解决了结构化P2P网络采用基于overlay层面的路由算法实现资源查找和定位导致的网络层路由性能无法估量的问题,能够准确表现结构化P2P网络overlay层面路由算法的实际网络性能,为结构化P2P网络路由算法的研究提供准确的性能评估机制。     

Performance analysis of BitTorrent-like systems with heterogeneous users

Among all peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, BitTorrent seems to be the most prevalent one. This success has drawn a great deal of research interest on the system. In particular, there have been many lines of research studying its scalability, performance, efficiency, and fairness. However, despite the large body of work, there has been no attempt mathematically to model, in a heterogeneous (and hence realistic) environment, what is perhaps the most important performance metric from an end user’s point of view: the average file download delay.

In this paper we propose a mathematical model that accurately predicts the average file download delay in a heterogeneous BitTorrent-like system. Our model is quite general, has been derived with minimal assumptions, and requires minimal system information. Then, we propose a flexible token-based scheme for BitTorrent-like systems that can be used to tradeoff between overall system performance and fairness to high bandwidth users, by properly setting its parameters. We extend our mathematical model to predict the average file download delays in the token- based system, and demonstrate how this model can be used to decide on the scheme’s parameters that achieve a target performance/fairness.     

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.     

分组P2P网络模型分包传输策略分析

Internet的飞速发展使对等网络(P2P)及其相关领域的研究成为热点,但是当前P2P网络的结构并不完善。文中介绍了几种P2P模型,并在综合这几种模型优点的基础上,针对P2P网络的动态特性提出了一种分组P2P模型。P2P的网络应用在正不断发展,P2P中的一个重要核心思想是分包传输,它所采用的分包算法对于我们开发P2P软件具有重要的参考价值.我们在本文中分析它的分包传输算法,并且结合参考Coolstreaming和沸点网络电视系统中的策略,对在P2P网络中进行视频、音频等多媒体流数据的传输的方法和性能进行分析。     

Application of a JXTA-overlay P2P system for end-device control and e-learning

This work is motivated by the need to develop decentralized P2P approaches for controlling end-devices in a wide-area network without changing the network security policy. Much of current research work on P2P systems is devoted to P2P networks of standard peers such as PCs. Due to improvements of connections capabilities of mobile devices and end-devices, there is an increasing interest to design, implement and deploy full featured P2P networks that integrate standard peers, mobile devices and end-devices. In this paper, we use the JXTA-Overlay for the control of end-devices and e-learning in a P2P network. We considered as end-devices the smart box (which is used for stimulating the learners in our implemented P2P e-learning system), robot, and room lightening. We also considered the control of a mobile car in order to prove the applicability of our approach in wireless environment. The proposed approach, due to the capabilities of JXTA protocols to overcome firewalls and NATs, is able to control devices without changing network security policies. We evaluate the proposed system by many experiments and have shown that the proposed system has a good performance and can be used successfully for the control of end-devices and in e-learning.     

分组P2P网络模型分包传输策略分析

Internet的飞速发展使对等网络（P2P）及其相关领域的研究成为热点,但是当前P2P网络的结构并不完善.文中介绍了几种P2P模型,并在综合这几种模型优点的基础上,针对P2P网络的动态特性提出了一种分组P2P模型.P2P的网络应用在正不断发展,P2P中的一个重要核心思想是分包传输,它所采用的分包算法对于我们开发P2p软件具有重要的参考价值.我们在本文中分析它的分包传输算法,并且结合参考Coolstreaming和沸点网络电视系统中的策略,对在P2P网络中进行视频、音频等多媒体流数据的传输的方法和性能进行分析.