Study of the Topology Mismatch Problem in Peer-to-Peer Networks

The advantages of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology are innumerable when compared to other systems like Distributed Messaging System, Client-Server model, Cloud based systems. The vital advantages are not limited to high scalability and low cost. On the other hand the p2p system suffers from a bottle-neck problem caused by topology mismatch. Topology mismatch occurs in an unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) network when the peers participating in the communication choose their neighbors in random fashion, such that the resultant P2P network mismatches its underlying physical network, resulting in a lengthy communication between the peers and redundant network traffics generated in the underlying network[1] However, most P2P system performance suffers from the mismatch between the overlays topology and the underlying physical network topology, causing a large volume of redundant traffic in the Internet slowing the performance. This paper surveys the P2P topology mismatch problems and the solutions adapted for different applications

A Location-Aware Middleware Framework for Collaborative Visual Information Discovery and Retrieval

This work addresses the problem of scalable location-aware distributed indexing to enable the leveraging of collaborative effort for the construction and maintenance of world-scale visual maps and models which could support numerous activities including navigation, visual localization, persistent surveillance, structure from motion, and hazard or disaster detection. Current distributed approaches to mapping and modeling fail to incorporate global geospatial addressing and are limited in their functionality to customize search. Our solution is a peer-to-peer middleware framework based on XOR distance routing which employs a Hilbert Space curve addressing scheme in a novel distributed geographic index. This allows for a universal addressing scheme supporting publish and search in dynamic environments while ensuring global availability of the model and scalability with respect to geographic size and number of users. The framework is evaluated using large-scale network simulations and a search application that supports visual navigation in real-world experiments

T-MAN: gossip-based overlay topology management

Syftet med specialarbetet är att presentera genren allåldersböcker samt att ge litteraturtips till den intresserade läsaren. Med en kortfattad definition innebär begreppet allåldersböcker böcker som kan läsas med lika stor behållning av såväl barn och ungdom som vuxna läsare. Specialarbetet inleds med utdrag ur olika intervjuer som jag gjort med fackmänniskor i bokvärlden. Sedan följer ett fyrtiotal annotationer som jag skrivit efter att ha läst dessa allåldersböcker. Bokurvalet har gjorts efter rekommendationer av ovannämnda personer. Slutligen följer en förteckning över icke-annoterad allålderslitteratur som valts ut enligt samma principer som de övriga verken

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

LayStream: composing standard gossip protocols for live video streaming

Gossip-based live streaming is a popular topic, as attested by the vast literature on the subject. Despite the particular merits of each proposal, all need to implement and deal with common challenges such as membership management, topology construction and video packets dissemination. Well-principled gossip-based protocols have been proposed in the literature for each of these aspects. Our goal is to assess the feasibility of building a live streaming system, \sys, as a composition of these existing protocols, to deploy the resulting system on real testbeds, and report on lessons learned in the process. Unlike previous evaluations conducted by simulations and considering each protocol independently, we use real deployments. We evaluate protocols both independently and as a layered composition, and unearth specific problems and challenges associated with deployment and composition. We discuss and present solutions for these, such as a novel topology construction mechanism able to cope with the specificities of a large-scale and delay-sensitive environment, but also with requirements from the upper layer. Our implementation and data are openly available to support experimental reproducibility

Analyzing and Enhancing Routing Protocols for Friend-to-Friend Overlays

The threat of surveillance by governmental and industrial parties is more eminent than ever. As communication moves into the digital domain, the advances in automatic assessment and interpretation of enormous amounts of data enable tracking of millions of people, recording and monitoring their private life with an unprecedented accurateness. The knowledge of such an all-encompassing loss of privacy affects the behavior of individuals, inducing various degrees of (self-)censorship and anxiety. Furthermore, the monopoly of a few large-scale organizations on digital communication enables global censorship and manipulation of public opinion. Thus, the current situation undermines the freedom of speech to a detrimental degree and threatens the foundations of modern society. Anonymous and censorship-resistant communication systems are hence of utmost importance to circumvent constant surveillance. However, existing systems are highly vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage. In particular, Sybil attacks, i.e., powerful parties inserting a large number of fake identities into the system, enable malicious parties to observe and possibly manipulate a large fraction of the communication within the system. Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, which restrict direct communication to parties sharing a real-world trust relationship, are a promising countermeasure to Sybil attacks, since the requirement of establishing real-world trust increases the cost of infiltration drastically. Yet, existing F2F overlays suffer from a low performance, are vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, or fail to provide anonymity. Our first contribution in this thesis is concerned with an in-depth analysis of the concepts underlying the design of state-of-the-art F2F overlays. In the course of this analysis, we first extend the existing evaluation methods considerably, hence providing tools for both our and future research in the area of F2F overlays and distributed systems in general. Based on the novel methodology, we prove that existing approaches are inherently unable to offer acceptable delays without either requiring exhaustive maintenance costs or enabling denial-of-service attacks and de-anonymization. Consequentially, our second contribution lies in the design and evaluation of a novel concept for F2F overlays based on insights of the prior in-depth analysis. Our previous analysis has revealed that greedy embeddings allow highly efficient communication in arbitrary connectivity-restricted overlays by addressing participants through coordinates and adapting these coordinates to the overlay structure. However, greedy embeddings in their original form reveal the identity of the communicating parties and fail to provide the necessary resilience in the presence of dynamic and possibly malicious users. Therefore, we present a privacy-preserving communication protocol for greedy embeddings based on anonymous return addresses rather than identifying node coordinates. Furthermore, we enhance the communication’s robustness and attack-resistance by using multiple parallel embeddings and alternative algorithms for message delivery. We show that our approach achieves a low communication complexity. By replacing the coordinates with anonymous addresses, we furthermore provably achieve anonymity in the form of plausible deniability against an internal local adversary. Complementary, our simulation study on real-world data indicates that our approach is highly efficient and effectively mitigates the impact of failures as well as powerful denial-of-service attacks. Our fundamental results open new possibilities for anonymous and censorship-resistant applications.Die Bedrohung der Überwachung durch staatliche oder kommerzielle Stellen ist ein drängendes Problem der modernen Gesellschaft. Heutzutage findet Kommunikation vermehrt über digitale Kanäle statt. Die so verfügbaren Daten über das Kommunikationsverhalten eines Großteils der Bevölkerung in Kombination mit den Möglichkeiten im Bereich der automatisierten Verarbeitung solcher Daten erlauben das großflächige Tracking von Millionen an Personen, deren Privatleben mit noch nie da gewesener Genauigkeit aufgezeichnet und beobachtet werden kann. Das Wissen über diese allumfassende Überwachung verändert das individuelle Verhalten und führt so zu (Selbst-)zensur sowie Ängsten. Des weiteren ermöglicht die Monopolstellung einiger weniger Internetkonzernen globale Zensur und Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung. Deshalb stellt die momentane Situation eine drastische Einschränkung der Meinungsfreiheit dar und bedroht die Grundfesten der modernen Gesellschaft. Systeme zur anonymen und zensurresistenten Kommunikation sind daher von ungemeiner Wichtigkeit. Jedoch sind die momentanen System anfällig gegen Sabotage. Insbesondere ermöglichen es Sybil-Angriffe, bei denen ein Angreifer eine große Anzahl an gefälschten Teilnehmern in ein System einschleust und so einen großen Teil der Kommunikation kontrolliert, Kommunikation innerhalb eines solchen Systems zu beobachten und zu manipulieren. F2F Overlays dagegen erlauben nur direkte Kommunikation zwischen Teilnehmern, die eine Vertrauensbeziehung in der realen Welt teilen. Dadurch erschweren F2F Overlays das Eindringen von Angreifern in das System entscheidend und verringern so den Einfluss von Sybil-Angriffen. Allerdings leiden die existierenden F2F Overlays an geringer Leistungsfähigkeit, Anfälligkeit gegen Denial-of-Service Angriffe oder fehlender Anonymität. Der erste Beitrag dieser Arbeit liegt daher in der fokussierten Analyse der Konzepte, die in den momentanen F2F Overlays zum Einsatz kommen. Im Zuge dieser Arbeit erweitern wir zunächst die existierenden Evaluationsmethoden entscheidend und erarbeiten so Methoden, die Grundlagen für unsere sowie zukünftige Forschung in diesem Bereich bilden. Basierend auf diesen neuen Evaluationsmethoden zeigen wir, dass die existierenden Ansätze grundlegend nicht fähig sind, akzeptable Antwortzeiten bereitzustellen ohne im Zuge dessen enorme Instandhaltungskosten oder Anfälligkeiten gegen Angriffe in Kauf zu nehmen. Folglich besteht unser zweiter Beitrag in der Entwicklung und Evaluierung eines neuen Konzeptes für F2F Overlays, basierenden auf den Erkenntnissen der vorangehenden Analyse. Insbesondere ergab sich in der vorangehenden Evaluation, dass Greedy Embeddings hoch-effiziente Kommunikation erlauben indem sie Teilnehmer durch Koordinaten adressieren und diese an die Struktur des Overlays anpassen. Jedoch sind Greedy Embeddings in ihrer ursprünglichen Form nicht auf anonyme Kommunikation mit einer dynamischen Teilnehmermengen und potentiellen Angreifern ausgelegt. Daher präsentieren wir ein Privätssphäre-schützenden Kommunikationsprotokoll für F2F Overlays, in dem die identifizierenden Koordinaten durch anonyme Adressen ersetzt werden. Des weiteren erhöhen wir die Resistenz der Kommunikation durch den Einsatz mehrerer Embeddings und alternativer Algorithmen zum Finden von Routen. Wir beweisen, dass unser Ansatz eine geringe Kommunikationskomplexität im Bezug auf die eigentliche Kommunikation sowie die Instandhaltung des Embeddings aufweist. Ferner zeigt unsere Simulationstudie, dass der Ansatz effiziente Kommunikation mit kurzen Antwortszeiten und geringer Instandhaltungskosten erreicht sowie den Einfluss von Ausfälle und Angriffe erfolgreich abschwächt. Unsere grundlegenden Ergebnisse eröffnen neue Möglichkeiten in der Entwicklung anonymer und zensurresistenter Anwendungen

USING PROBABILISTIC GRAPHICAL MODELS TO DRAW INFERENCES IN SENSOR NETWORKS WITH TRACKING APPLICATIONS

Sensor networks have been an active research area in the past decade due to the variety of their applications. Many research studies have been conducted to solve the problems underlying the middleware services of sensor networks, such as self-deployment, self-localization, and synchronization. With the provided middleware services, sensor networks have grown into a mature technology to be used as a detection and surveillance paradigm for many real-world applications. The individual sensors are small in size. Thus, they can be deployed in areas with limited space to make unobstructed measurements in locations where the traditional centralized systems would have trouble to reach. However, there are a few physical limitations to sensor networks, which can prevent sensors from performing at their maximum potential. Individual sensors have limited power supply, the wireless band can get very cluttered when multiple sensors try to transmit at the same time. Furthermore, the individual sensors have limited communication range, so the network may not have a 1-hop communication topology and routing can be a problem in many cases. Carefully designed algorithms can alleviate the physical limitations of sensor networks, and allow them to be utilized to their full potential. Graphical models are an intuitive choice for designing sensor network algorithms. This thesis focuses on a classic application in sensor networks, detecting and tracking of targets. It develops feasible inference techniques for sensor networks using statistical graphical model inference, binary sensor detection, events isolation and dynamic clustering. The main strategy is to use only binary data for rough global inferences, and then dynamically form small scale clusters around the target for detailed computations. This framework is then extended to network topology manipulation, so that the framework developed can be applied to tracking in different network topology settings. Finally the system was tested in both simulation and real-world environments. The simulations were performed on various network topologies, from regularly distributed networks to randomly distributed networks. The results show that the algorithm performs well in randomly distributed networks, and hence requires minimum deployment effort. The experiments were carried out in both corridor and open space settings. A in-home falling detection system was simulated with real-world settings, it was setup with 30 bumblebee radars and 30 ultrasonic sensors driven by TI EZ430-RF2500 boards scanning a typical 800 sqft apartment. Bumblebee radars are calibrated to detect the falling of human body, and the two-tier tracking algorithm is used on the ultrasonic sensors to track the location of the elderly people

Tackling Exascale Software Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations with GROMACS

GROMACS is a widely used package for biomolecular simulation, and over the last two decades it has evolved from small-scale efficiency to advanced heterogeneous acceleration and multi-level parallelism targeting some of the largest supercomputers in the world. Here, we describe some of the ways we have been able to realize this through the use of parallelization on all levels, combined with a constant focus on absolute performance. Release 4.6 of GROMACS uses SIMD acceleration on a wide range of architectures, GPU offloading acceleration, and both OpenMP and MPI parallelism within and between nodes, respectively. The recent work on acceleration made it necessary to revisit the fundamental algorithms of molecular simulation, including the concept of neighborsearching, and we discuss the present and future challenges we see for exascale simulation - in particular a very fine-grained task parallelism. We also discuss the software management, code peer review and continuous integration testing required for a project of this complexity.Comment: EASC 2014 conference proceedin