Motivation and Approach
P2P computing has experienced an explosive growth in the last
few years and a number of widely-deployed and research-oriented
protocols have become available. Although the goal of most P2P
systems is to provide general distributed resource sharing among
the participating peers, two of the most popular applications are
shared storage and content distribution.
In such systems,
participating nodes, some of them contributing storage space, form
a self-organized overlay network over which clients' requests,
servers' replies and content are distributed. These architectures
try to leverage the diversity and number of nodes and the nodes'
collective storage to achieve increased availability.
In this project we are addressing some of the many challenges
facing these applications, including:
- High levels of churn in peer populations and its implications on the amount of maintenance-related traffic, the degree of replication, the effectiveness of caches, and the spread and satisfaction level of queries.
- Storage availability in the face of high failure rate and frequent node joins and departures.
- Performance and availability - availability, however, is not restricted to uptime. After determining alternative sources for a desired object, the requesting peer initiates the object download from the provider(s), with each party effectively adopting client and server roles. While a server-peer may be functioning correctly, it may be under such heavy load as to be unable to deliver a satisfactory performance to its clients.
People
Publications
- Yi Qiao, Dong Lu, Fabián E. Bustamante and Peter
Dinda. "Looking at the Server-Side of Peer-to-Peer
Systems", In Proc. of the 7th Workshop on
Languages, Compilers and Run-time Support for Scalable
Systems, Houston, TX, USA, October 2004 (Also published as
Tech. Report
NWU-CS-04-37).
- Yi Qiao and Fabián E. Bustamante. "Elders
Know Best: Lifespan-Based Ideas in P2P Systems",
Work-In-Progress, 19th Symposium on Operating Systems
Principles, Bolton Landing, NY, USA, October 2003.
Abstract | PostScript [22K] | PDF Format [23K] - Fabián E. Bustamante and Yi Qiao.
"Friendships that last: Peer lifespan and its role in
P2P protocols", accepted for publication,
International Workshop on Web Content Caching and
Distribution, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne,
NY, USA Sep-Oct, 2003. Also published as Tech. Report
NWU-CS-03-21).
Abstract | PostScript [139K] | PDF Format [312K]
Related Projects
- Steve Gribble's measurement studies of web, content-delivery, and peer-to-peer systems
- Piazza peer data management
- PAST
- The Chord Project
- Stanford Peers
- LOCKSS
- ...