Strata: A simple lightweight ad hoc communications infrastructure

This thesis presents Strata, a lightweight scalable implementation of the Safari architecture. Safari is an ad hoc network architecture, providing scalability to tens of thousands of nodes, integration of existing infrastructure, and self-organizing, decentralized network services. The Safari architecture is based on a self-organizing hierarchy that recursively partitions the network and assigns coordinates to nodes. Strata leverages the Safari structure to efficiently provide routing between two network hosts. As part of Strata's development, we developed a scalable, extensible network simulation environment that enables simulation of very large networks. The simulator's extensibility allowed us to explore the design space, revisiting many of the design decisions in the original Safari prototype. Early simulation results indicate that Strata can scale to several thousand fully mobile nodes with acceptable overhead

FeedTree: Sharing Web micronews with peer-to-peer event notification

Syndication of micronews, frequently-updated content on the Web, is currently accomplished with RSS feeds and client applications that poll those feeds. However, providers of RSS content have recently become concerned about the escalating bandwidth demand of RSS readers. Current efforts to address this problem by optimizing the polling behavior of clients sacrifice timeliness without fundamentally improving the scalability of the system. In this paper, we argue for a micronews distribution system called FeedTree, which uses a peer-to-peer overlay network to distribute RSS feed data to subscribers promptly and efficiently. Peers in the network share the bandwidth costs, which reduces the load on the provider, and updated content is delivered to clients as soon as it is available

Strata: A simple lightweight ad hoc communications infrastructure

This thesis presents Strata, a lightweight scalable implementation of the Safari architecture. Safari is an ad hoc network architecture, providing scalability to tens of thousands of nodes, integration of existing infrastructure, and self-organizing, decentralized network services. The Safari architecture is based on a self-organizing hierarchy that recursively partitions the network and assigns coordinates to nodes. Strata leverages the Safari structure to efficiently provide routing between two network hosts. As part of Strata's development, we developed a scalable, extensible network simulation environment that enables simulation of very large networks. The simulator's extensibility allowed us to explore the design space, revisiting many of the design decisions in the original Safari prototype. Early simulation results indicate that Strata can scale to several thousand fully mobile nodes with acceptable overhead

[Software]: General—Peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (p2p) technology can potentially be used to build highly reliable applications without a single point of failure. However, most of the existing applications, such as file sharing or web caching, have only moderate reliability demands. Without a challenging proving ground, it remains unclear whether the full potential of p2p systems can be realized. To provide such a proving ground, we have designed, deployed and operated a p2p-based email system. We chose email because users depend on it for their daily work and therefore place high demands on the availability and reliability of the service, as well as the durability, integrity, authenticity and privacy of their email. Our system, ePOST, has been actively used by a small group of participants for over two years. In this paper, we report the problems and pitfalls we encountered in this process. We were able to address some of them by applying known principles of system design, while others turned out to be novel and fundamental, requiring us to devise new solutions. Our findings can be used to guide the design of future reliable p2p systems and provide interesting new directions for future research