Optimized P2P streaming for wireless distributed networks

The future Internet will support pervasive applications and communications models that require end-nodes cooperation, such as fog computing and machine-to-machine communications. Among the many applications, also video streaming can be provided with a cooperative and peer-to-peer approach. Cooperative distribution requires building a distribution overlay on top of the physical topology (the underlay). This work proposes an optimized, cross-layer approach to build this overlay minimizing the impact on the underlay. We design an optimal strategy, which is proven to be NP-complete, and thus not solvable with a distributed, lightweight protocol. The optimal strategy is relaxed exploiting the knowledge on the betweenness centrality of the nodes in the underlay topology, obtaining two easily implementable solutions applicable to any link-state protocol for distributed wireless mesh networks. The additional introduction of heuristic improvements further optimizes the performance in real network scenarios. Extensive simulation results support the theoretical findings using three different network topologies. They show that the relaxed implementations are reasonably close to the optimal solution, and provide vast gains compared to the traditional overlay topologies that peer-to-peer applications build.     

一种令P2P覆盖网络拓扑相关的通用方法

利用分布式哈希表,有结构的对等(peer-to-peer,简称P2P)网络具备了较短的路由长度和较好的扩展性.然而,由此产生了覆盖网络和物理网络之间的不匹配问题,它严重阻碍了在大规模环境下建立有效的对等网络.提出一种通用的、协议无关的方法来解决该问题.该方法基于节点交换机制,通过发现并实施有利于覆盖网络和物理网络匹配的节点交换来降低网络时延、提高性能.实验表明,该方法在明显降低了覆盖网络的平均时延的同时,也保证了额外开销可控.此外,若与其他协议相关的方法相结合,系统性能还可以得到进一步提高.     

对等网络拓扑测量与特征分析

测量分析对等网络(peer-to-peer networks)拓扑特征是解决P2P优化、网络监管等问题的基础.对等网络是一类大规模、自组织、并且高度动态的复杂网络系统,准确、完整地测量所有对等网络拓扑面临很大困难.研究对等网络的协议特点,分析特定P2P拓扑实例成为认识P2P拓扑特性的一种可选研究方案.以Gnutella网络为测量对象,定义了对等网络拓扑测量系统准确性、完整性的衡量指标,设计、实现了基于正反馈的分布式Gnutella拓扑爬行器——D-Crawler;分析了Gnutella网络拓扑图的度等级分布特征、度频率分布特征以及小世界特性.实验和分析结果表明,对等网络拓扑图属性特征与其使用的协议和客户端软件行为密切相关;Gnutella网络中不同层次的节点之间的拓扑关系表现出不同的特性:上层节点组成的子图具有度等级幂律特征,但在其度频率分布上却呈现出正态分布的特性;下层节点在度等级分布上的幂律特征表现不强烈,而在其度频率分布特征上具有明显的幂律特性.拟合结果表明:幂律能够较好地拟合度等级分布和下层节点度频率分布,然而对于上层节点度概率密度分布,Gaussian拟合效果最好.Gnutella网络具有小世界特性,即:较大的聚集系数和较小的特征路径长度,但它不是无尺度图,不符合BA(Barabási-Albert)生长模型,其发展遵循一种不同于BA模型的生长过程.     

An experimental analysis of Joost peer-to-peer VoD service

Despite strong interest in peer-to-peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, existing studies mostly focus on peer-to-peer or overlay protocol design based on simulations under various topological constraints. We believe experimental studies on a real-life P2P VoD system will provide valuable information to ISPs, network administrators, and content owners. In this paper we present a comprehensive analytical and experimental study on Joost, one of the first commercial P2P VoD systems used for distributing various forms of video over the Internet. Our extensive experiments prove that Joost is a server-assisted peer-to-peer VoD system. With several envisioned typical scenarios we have further investigated the peer management in terms of time pattern, bandwidth consumption and locality considerations. Our major findings include: (1) the current Joost system is capable of providing high-quality VoD service through the use of an overlay network deployed with a set of centralized content servers; (2) inter-continental links are often used regardless of the number of local users, which may pose a high burden on the network providers; (3) easily reachable, high-capacity nodes are selected as main relaying nodes, similar to super nodes in Skype, to facilitate the traversal of symmetric NATs and firewalls. We also provide insights on the potential ways to construct more efficient P2P VoD systems (e.g. considering topological locality-awareness, using adaptive/layered video).     

A self-similar super-peer overlay construction scheme for super large-scale P2P applications

Unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks with two-layer hierarchy, comprising an upper layer of super-peers and an underlying layer of ordinary peers, are used to improve the performance of large-scale P2P applications like content distribution and storage. In order to deal with continuous growth of participating peers, a scalable and efficient super-peer overlay topology is essential. However, there is relatively little research conducted on constructing such super-peer overlay topology. In the existed solutions, the number of connections required to be maintained by a super-peer is in direct proportion to the total number of super-peers. For super large-scale P2P applications, i.e. the number of participating peer is over 1,000,000, these solutions are not scalable and impractical. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a scalable hierarchical unstructured P2P system in which a self-similar square network graph (SSNG) is proposed to construct and maintain the super-peer overlay topology adaptively. The SSNG topology is a constant-degree topology in which each node maintains a constant number of neighbor nodes. Moreover, a simple and efficient message forwarding algorithm is presented to ensure each super-peer to receive just one flooding message. The analytical results showed that the proposed SSNG-based overlay is more scalable and efficient than the perfect difference graph (PDG)-based overlay proposed in the literature.     

Path-Diversity P2P Overlay Retransmission for Reliable IP-Multicast

IP-multicast is a bandwidth efficient transmission mechanism for group communications. Reliability in IP-multicast, however, poses a set of significant challenges. To address the reliability and scalability issues in IP-multicast, this paper proposes a novel, highly distributed, and lightweight overlay peer-to-peer retransmission architecture that exploits path-diversity by taking advantages of both IP-multicast and an overlay network. An approach that leverages both disjoint-path-finding and periodic selective probing to take into account peer's recent packet loss probability, retransmission delay and recent retransmission success rate is proposed to effectively construct an efficient and dynamic overlay retransmission network. We show that the proposed path diversity overlay retransmission architecture has the potential to significantly reduce the retransmission delay, improve the reliability, playback quality, and scalability of IP-multicast based multimedia applications. Given a deployed IP-multicast network, the proposed overlay retransmission architecture is practical, scalable, and easy to deploy, requiring no change to the existing network infrastructure.     

一种基于结构化P2P网络的拓扑匹配算法*

基于结构化的P2P系统在构建覆盖网络时未考虑到与实际物理网络层的结合,导致逻辑拓扑结构与物理拓扑结构严重不匹配问题,提出一种协议无关的拓扑匹配算法,通过事件触发的方式触发网络调整逻辑层的网络拓扑结构。模拟实验表明,本算法在一定程度上提高了网络的拓扑匹配度,降低了网络开销。     

Request-driven swarming scheme for P2P data streaming

Data streaming by swarming over peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks has attracted much attention in recent years and initially the swarming solution is based on data-driven schemes. This paper presents a new request-driven swarming scheme. The scheme offers several advantages: high efficiency in data delivery, low control overhead, and flexibility in streaming control. Some key issues on the design of the relevant scheduling and forwarding mechanisms are discussed. In addition, we present a scheduling model for this scheme and propose some heuristics. Our evaluation of these heuristics reveals that there is a tradeoff among performance metrics such as delivery reliability, loading on the underlay network, and on the streaming overlay network. Comparing our proposed request-driven scheme with an existing data-driven scheme using computer simulation, we find that our request-driven scheme incurs much lower control overhead while providing comparable or better efficiency in data delivery.     

Efficient triangulation for P2P networked virtual environments

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become a popular design choice for building scalable Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In P2P-based NVEs, system and data management is distributed among all participating users. Towards this end, a Delaunay Triangulation can be used to provide connectivity between the different NVE users depending on their positions in the virtual world. However, a Delaunay Triangulation clearly suffers from high maintenance cost as it is subject to high connection change rate due to continuous users’ movement. In this paper, we propose a new triangulation algorithm that provides network connectivity to support P2P NVEs while dramatically decreasing maintenance overhead by reducing the number of connection changes due to users’ insertion and movement. Performance evaluations show that our solution drastically reduces overlay maintenance cost in highly dynamic NVEs. More importantly, and beyond its quantitative advantages, this work questions the well accepted Delaunay Triangulation as a reference means for providing connectivity in NVEs, and paves the way for more research towards more practical alternatives for NVE applications.     

TR-clustering: Alleviating the impact of false clustering on P2P overlay networks

Designing topologically-aware overlays is a recurrent subject in peer-to-peer research. Although there exists a plethora of approaches, Internet coordinate systems such as GNP (which attempt to predict the pair-wise O(N²) latencies between N nodes using only O(N) measurements) have become the most attractive approach to make the overlay connectivity structures congruent with the underlying IP-level network topology. With appropriate input, coordinate systems allow complex distributed problems to be solved geometrically, including multicast, server selection, etc. For these applications, and presumably others like that, exact topological information is not required and it is sufficient to use informative hints about the relative positions of Internet clients. Clustering operation, which attempts to partition a set of objects into several subsets that are distinguishable under some criterion of similarity, could significantly ease these operations. However, when the main objective is clustering nodes, Internet coordinate systems present strong limitations to identify the right clusters, a problem known as false clustering.In this work, the authors answer a fundamental question that has been obscured in proximity techniques so far: how often false clustering happens in reality and how much this affects the overall performance of an overlay. To that effect, the authors present a novel approach called TR-Clustering to cluster nodes in overlay networks based on their physical positions on the Internet. To be specific, TR-Clustering uses the Internet routers with high vertex betweenness centrality to cluster participating nodes. Informally, the betweenness centrality of a router is defined as the fraction of shortest paths between all pairs of nodes running through it. Simulation results illustrate that TR-Clustering is superior to existing techniques, with less than a 5% of falsely clustered peers (of course, relative to the datasets utilized in their evaluation).     

Adding structure to unstructured peer-to-peer networks: the use of small-world graphs

The “small-world” graph structure is pervasive and is observed to arise “without-design” or “naturally” in many practical systems such as the World Wide Web. In contrast to natural systems, overlay networks provide an opportunity to design structure. We seek the advantages of designing overlay topologies with small-world properties to support file sharing in peer-to-peer networks. We focus on two metrics of performance: (a) search protocol performance, a local gain perceived directly by peer-to-peer network users and (b) network utilization, a global property that is of interest to network service providers. We propose a class of overlay topologies and show, by simulation, that a particular topology instance of this class where every node has many close neighbors and few random neighbors (i.e., a small-world graph) exhibits very good properties. In this overlay topology, the chances of locating files are high, and the nodes where these files are found are, on average, close to the query source. This improvement in search protocol performance is achieved while decreasing the traffic load on the links in the underlying network. We propose a simple greedy algorithm to construct such overlay topologies where each node operates independently and in a decentralized manner to select its neighbors.     

A platform for P2P agent-based collaborative applications

The operational environment can be a valuable source of information about the behavior of software applications and their usage context. Although a single instance of an application has limited evidence of the range of the possible behaviors and situations that might be experienced in the field, the collective knowledge composed by the evidence gathered by the many instances of a same application running in several diverse user environments (eg, a browser) might be an invaluable source of information. This information can be exploited by applications able to autonomously analyze how they behave in the field and adjust their behavior accordingly. Augmenting applications with the capability to collaborate and directly share information about their behavior is challenging because it requires the definition of a fully decentralized and dependable networked infrastructure whose nodes are the user machines. The nodes of the infrastructure must be collaborative, to share information, and autonomous, to exploit the available information to change their behavior, for instance, to better accommodate the needs of the users to prevent known problems. This paper describes the initial results that we obtained with the design and the development of an infrastructure that can enable the execution of collaborative scenarios in a fully decentralized way. Our idea is to combine the agent-based paradigm, which is well suited to design collaborative and autonomous nodes, and the peer-to-peer paradigm, which is well suited to design distributed and dynamic network infrastructures. To demonstrate our idea, we augmented the popular JADE agent-based platform with a software layer that supports both the creation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network of JADE platforms and the execution of services within that network, thus enabling JADE multiagent systems (MASs) to behave as peer-to-peer networks. The resulting platform can be used to study the design of collaborative applications running in the field.     

Downloading trace study for BitTorrent P2P performance measurement and analysis

With the increasing client population and the explosive volume of Internet media content, the peer-to-peer networking technologies and systems provide a rapid and scalable content distribution mechanism in the global networks. The BitTorrent protocol and its derivatives are among the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications, which contribute a dominant fraction of today??s Internet traffic. In this paper, we conduct the performance measurement and analysis of BitTorrent systems with an extensive volume of real trace logs. We use several downloading-side metrics, including overall downloading time, maximum of downloading bandwidth, average bandwidth utilization, maximum of downloading connections, and average number of active connections, to derive various interesting results from the downloading-side aspect of network resource usage. Performance examination learns many new observations and characteristics into the virtue of BitTorrent protocols and systems, thereby providing beneficial information for bandwidth allocation and connection control in BitTorrent client applications. Therefore, this study is complementary to many previous research works that mainly focused on system-oriented and uploading-side performance measurements.     

结构化P2P系统中覆盖图拓扑匹配的研究

在结构化P2P系统中,建立逻辑覆盖图时并没有考虑实际物理层的拓扑结构,这将导致覆盖图与底层物理图的严重不匹配,从而使得覆盖图上相邻节点的延迟远远大于其物理图中的延迟,并在Internet中造成大量不必要的流量。该文提出了一个拓扑匹配算法,通过模拟仿真实验证明,该算法能在很大程度上解决不匹配问题,并使拉伸系数大大减小。     

Sporadic decentralized resource maintenance for P2P distributed storage networks

In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized resource maintenance strategy for peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed storage networks. Our strategy relies on the Wuala overlay network architecture, (The WUALA Project). While the latter is based, for the resource distribution among peers, on the use of erasure codes, e.g., Reed–Solomon codes, here we investigate the system behavior when a simple randomized network coding strategy is applied. We propose to replace the Wuala regular and centralized strategy for resource maintenance with a decentralized strategy, where users regenerate new fragments sporadically, namely every time a resource is retrieved. Both strategies are analyzed, analytically and through simulations, in the presence of either erasure and network coding. It will be shown that the novel sporadic maintenance strategy, when used with randomized network coding, leads to a fully decentralized solution with management complexity much lower than common centralized solutions.     

Dynamic Bandwidth Auctions in Multioverlay P2P Streaming with Network Coding

In peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming applications such as IPTV, it is natural to accommodate multiple coexisting streaming overlays, corresponding to channels of programming. In the case of multiple overlays, it is a challenging task to design an appropriate bandwidth allocation protocol, such that these overlays efficiently share the available upload bandwidth on peers, media content is efficiently distributed to achieve the required streaming rate, as well as the streaming costs are minimized. In this paper, we seek to design simple, effective, and decentralized strategies to resolve conflicts among coexisting streaming overlays in their bandwidth competition and combine such strategies with network-coding-based media distribution to achieve efficient multioverlay streaming. Since such strategies of conflict are game theoretic in nature, we characterize them as a decentralized collection of dynamic auction games, in which downstream peers bid for upload bandwidth at the upstream peers for the delivery of coded media blocks. With extensive theoretical analysis and performance evaluation, we show that these local games converge to an optimal topology for each overlay in realistic asynchronous environments. Together with network-coding-based media dissemination, these streaming overlays adapt to peer dynamics, fairly share peer upload bandwidth to achieve satisfactory streaming rates, and can be prioritized.     

Peer counting and sampling in overlay networks based on random walks

In this article, we address the problem of counting the number of peers in a peer-to-peer system. This functionality has proven useful in the design of several peer-to-peer applications. However, it is delicate to achieve when nodes are organised in an overlay network, and each node has only a limited, local knowledge of the whole system. In this paper, we propose a generic technique, called the Sample&Collide method, to solve this problem. It relies on a sampling sub-routine which returns randomly chosen peers. Such a sampling sub-routine is of independent interest. It can be used for instance for neighbour selection by new nodes joining the system. We use a continuous time random walk to obtain such samples. The core of the method consists in gathering random samples until a target number of redundant samples are obtained. This method is inspired by the “birthday paradox” technique of Bawa et al. (Estimating aggregates on a peer-to-peer network, Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University), upon which it improves by achieving a target variance with fewer samples. We analyse the complexity and accuracy of the proposed method. We illustrate in particular how expansion properties of the overlay affect its performance. We use simulations to evaluate its performance in both static and dynamic environments with sudden changes in peer populations, and verify that it tracks varying system sizes accurately.     

A Scalable Overlay Multicast Architecture for Large-Scale Applications

In this paper, we propose a two-tier overlay multicast architecture (TOMA) to provide scalable and efficient multicast support for various group communication applications. In TOMA, multicast service overlay network (MSON) is advocated as the backbone service domain, while end users in access domains form a number of small clusters, in which an application-layer multicast protocol is used for the communication between the clustered end users. TOMA is able to provide efficient resource utilization with less control overhead, especially for large-scale applications. It also alleviates the state scalability problem and simplifies multicast tree construction and maintenance when there are large numbers of groups in the network. To help MSON providers efficiently plan backbone service overlay, we suggest several provisioning algorithms to locate proxies, select overlay links, and allocate link bandwidth. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the promising performance of TOMA     

基于SkipGraph的P2P覆盖网信任证链发现

提出一种基于skip图P2P覆盖网模型的分布式信任证存储和发现机制。为保证索引和发现效率,采用RT1^r语言作为信任证描述语言,其语义属性作为skip图中的索引关键字,构造了基于关键字前缀相似和支持范围查询的P2P覆盖网。通过试验评测和分析,该机制具有较高的查询效率和负载均衡机制。