Design and evaluation of interconnecting structured peer-to-peer networks with a hierarchical topology

El tráfico en Internet está evolucionando continuamente. En el siglo XX, la mayor parte del tráfico en Internet soportado por los Proveedores de Servicios de Internet (ISP’s en terminología anglosajona) estaba relacionado con el tráfico web. Sin embargo, actualmente, el tráfico en Internet ha evolucionado drásticamente. La mayor parte del tráfico en Internet es tráfico Peer-to-Peer. Este cambio cambia completamente la situación en comparación con el siglo anterior, de ahí la relevancia del paradigma de las redes Peer-to-Peer. La adopción de las redes Peer-to-Peer está principalmente motivada por su uso en aplicaciones de compartición de ficheros pero la aplicación de las redes Peer-to-Peer no está sólo limitada al paradigma de compartición de ficheros. De hecho, las redes Peer-to-Peer son adecuadas para el desarrollo de cualquier servicio o aplicación distribuida ya que permiten almacenar información de manera distribuida entre un conjunto de nodos. Además, también permiten recuperar esa información cuando sea necesario. Una aplicación relevante basada en redes Peer-to-Peer es Skype la cual permite un servicio de VoIP entre varios millones de personas. Sin embargo, la interoperabilidad entre diferentes redes Peer-to-Peer no ha sido resuelta todavía. Cada red Peer-to-Peer define su propio mecanismo y su propio formato de paquete. Por lo tanto, sería deseable definir algún mecanismo que permita el intercambio de información entre diferentes redes Peer-to-Peer. Esta Tesis define un mecanismo que permite el intercambio de información entre diferentes redes Peer-to-Peer estructuradas, concretamente redes overlay basadas en DHT’s (Distributed Hash Tables). Este mecanismo está basado en un formato común de paquete, que asegura la interoperabilidad entre diferentes redes overlay, y en una arquitectura jerárquica. Esta arquitectura jerárquica está compuesta por dos niveles de jerarquáa. El nivel más bajo de la jerarquía está compuesto por las diferentes redes overlay que desean estar interconectadas. Cada una de estas redes overlay puede usar cualquier DHT, no existe ninguna restricción al respecto. Al menos un super-peer existe en cada una de estas redes overlay del nivel inferior; además, estos super-peer también participan en el nivel superior. Al nivel superior se le conoce como Red de Interconexión y está compuesto sólo por una red overlay. Su función es similar al servicio de DNS pero en el área de las redes Peer-to-Peer. En la Red de Interconexión se guarda la información de localización de cada uno de los super-peers y también el dominio o la overlay a la que representan. Por lo tanto, si un recurso de otra red quiere ser recuperado, un peer tiene que reenviar la petición a su super-peer. El super-peer consulta a la Red de Interconexión para localizar al super-peer que se hace cargo de la red destino donde se encuentra el recurso deseado y una vez que se localizar al super-peer, se le reenvía la petición. Finalmente, el super-peer en la red destino buscar el recurso deseado y lo envía de vuelta al peer que originó la petición. La arquitectura propuesta ha sido estudiada analíticamente para asegurar que el rendimiento es razonable en comparación con otras redes Peer-to-Peer. Además, la propuesta es validada con una herramienta de simulación para asegurar que las asunciones en el modelo analítico no afectan en un escenario más general. Finalmente, una implementación real sobre un entorno controlado es mostrada para demostrar la aplicabilidad y viabilidad de la propuesta. Los escenarios para las simulaciones y la verificación de la implementación han sido diseñados con especial cuidado para tener unas condiciones lo más cercanas posibles a escenarios reales.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The traffic in the Internet is evolving continuously. In the 20th century, the most traffic supported by Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) was related with web traffic. However, nowadays, the traffic in the Internet has evolved drastically; now, most of the traffic in the Internet is Peer-to-Peer traffic. This fact changes completely the situation in comparison with the end of the previous century, thus the relevance of the Peer-to-Peer paradigm nowadays is evident. The adoption of Peer-to-Peer overlay networks was firstly motivated for its usage in file-sharing applications but the applicability of Peer-to-Peer overlay networks is not only limited to this kind of applications. In fact, Peer-to-Peer overlay networks are suitable for the development of any distributed application or service since they allow the allocation and retrieval of information in a distributed fashion among a set of nodes. However, each overlay network has its own structure and mechanisms to distribute the information among all nodes. Additionally, each Peer-to-Peer overlay network implementation usually defines its own packet format. Therefore, the interoperability among different overlay networks is not possible. This Thesis defines a mechanism to allow the exchange of information among different structured Peer-to Peer overlay networks, concretely DHT (Distributed Hash Table) overlay networks. This mechanism is based on both a common packet format, which assures the interoperability among different overlay networks, and on a hierarchical architecture. This hierarchical architecture has two levels of hierarchy. The lower level of the hierarchy is composed by the different overlay networks that want to be interconnected. Each one of these overlay networks can use any DHT overlay network with no restrictions. In addition, each overlay network in the lower level has at least one special peer, called super-peer. These super-peers are attached to the top level. This top level is named Interconnection Overlay and it is composed by just one overlay network. The purpose of super-peers is to route the queries among different overlay networks and they use the Interconnection Overlay to achieve this objective. In this Interconnection Overlay, the location information of each one of the superpeers and the overlay network represented by them are stored. Therefore, super-peers can forward the queries with the information stored in the Interconnection Overlay. If a resource placed in other overlay network wants to be obtained, a peer has to forward the query to its super-peer. The super-peer gets from the Interconnection Overlay the information about the super-peer that takes care of the destination overlay network and forwards this request. Finally, the super-peer in the destination overlay network looks for the desired resource and once is retrieved the answer is sent back to the requester. The proposed architecture is mathematically analysed to obtain is performance in term of hops and number of overlay routing entries in peers. Furthermore, the proposal is validated with a simulation tool to assure that the assumptions in the analytical model have been enough accurate. Finally, a real implementation over a controlled environment demonstrates the applicability and viability of the proposal and allows removing many of the original assumptions. The scenarios for the simulation analysis and the evaluation of the implementation have been designed carefully in order to define conditions as similar as possible to the real world

A novel service discovery model for decentralised online social networks.

Online social networks (OSNs) have become the most popular Internet application that attracts billions of users to share information, disseminate opinions and interact with others in the online society. The unprecedented growing popularity of OSNs naturally makes using social network services as a pervasive phenomenon in our daily life. The majority of OSNs service providers adopts a centralised architecture because of its management simplicity and content controllability. However, the centralised architecture for large-scale OSNs applications incurs costly deployment of computing infrastructures and suffers performance bottleneck. Moreover, the centralised architecture has two major shortcomings: the single point failure problem and the lack of privacy, which challenges the uninterrupted service provision and raises serious privacy concerns. This thesis proposes a decentralised approach based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as an alternative to the traditional centralised architecture. Firstly, a self-organised architecture with self-sustaining social network adaptation has been designed to support decentralised topology maintenance. This self-organised architecture exhibits small-world characteristics with short average path length and large average clustering coefficient to support efficient information exchange. Based on this self-organised architecture, a novel decentralised service discovery model has been developed to achieve a semantic-aware and interest-aware query routing in the P2P social network. The proposed model encompasses a service matchmaking module to capture the hidden semantic information for query-service matching and a homophily-based query processing module to characterise user’s common social status and interests for personalised query routing. Furthermore, in order to optimise the efficiency of service discovery, a swarm intelligence inspired algorithm has been designed to reduce the query routing overhead. This algorithm employs an adaptive forwarding strategy that can adapt to various social network structures and achieves promising search performance with low redundant query overhead in dynamic environments. Finally, a configurable software simulator is implemented to simulate complex networks and to evaluate the proposed service discovery model. Extensive experiments have been conducted through simulations, and the obtained results have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model.University of Derb

Sicherheit und Privatsphäre in Online Sozialen Netzwerken

Online Soziale Netzwerke (OSNs) repräsentieren das vorherrschende Medium zur computergestützten Kommunikation und Verbreitung persönlicher, geschäftlicher oder auch wissenschaftlicher Inhalte. Eine Reihe von Vorkommnissen in der jüngsten Vergangenheit hat gezeigt, dass die Bereitstellung privater Informationen in OSNs mit erheblichen Risiken für die Sicherheit und den Schutz der Privatsphäre seiner Nutzer verbunden ist. Gleiches gilt für die Bereiche Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft. Ursächlich dafür ist die zentralisierte Verwaltung der Nutzer und ihrer publizierten Inhalte unter einer singulären administrativen Domäne. Mit Vegas präsentiert der erste Teil dieser Arbeit ein dezentrales OSN, das mit seiner restriktiven Sicherheitsarchitektur diesem Problem begegnet. Oberstes Ziel ist die technische Umsetzung des Rechts auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung. Dazu schränkt Vegas den Zugriff auf den sozialen Graphen und jeglichen Informationsaustausch auf die Nutzer des eigenen Egonetzwerks ein. Neben der Möglichkeit zur Kommunikation und der Bereitstellung persönlicher Informationen erlauben einige OSNs auch das Browsen des sozialen Graphen und die Suche nach Inhalten anderer Nutzer. Um auch in sicheren und die Privatsphäre schützenden OSNs wie Vegas vom akkumulierten Wissen des sozialen Graphen zu profitieren, beschäftigt sich der zweite Teil dieser Arbeit mit der Entwicklung und Analyse intelligenter Priorisierungsstrategien zur Weiterleitung von Suchanfragen innerhalb dezentraler OSNs. Im Kontext von OSNs werden neue Algorithmen und Protokolle zunächst simulativ evaluiert. Die Grundlage bildet in der Regel der Crawling-Datensatz eines OSNs. Offensichtlich ist das Crawling in sicheren und die Privatsphäre schützenden dezentralen OSNs wie Vegas nicht möglich. Um diesem Problem zu begegnen, beschäftigt sich der dritte Teil dieser Arbeit mit der Entwicklung eines generischen Modells zur künstlichen Erzeugung sozialer Interaktionsgraphen. Neben den strukturellen Besonderheiten zentralisierter und dezentraler Systeme wird erstmals auch das Interaktionsverhalten der Nutzer eines OSNs modelliert. Die Eignung des Modells wird auf der Grundlage gecrawlter sozialer Graphen evaluiert.Online Social Networks (OSNs) represent the dominating media for computer-aided communication and the distribution of personal, commercial, and scientific content. Recently a series of incidents has shown that, for its users, the provision of private information in an OSN can create considerable security and privacy risks. The same statement holds for the commercial and the scientific domain. The problem arises from a centralized organization of users and their published contents and its management through a single administrative domain. To overcome this problem, the first part of this thesis introduces Vegas, a decentralized OSN which is based on a highly restrictive security architecture. The major goal of Vegas is to provide a technical implementation of the right for informational self-determination. Therefore Vegas restricts access to the social graph and the exchange of information to users of the own ego-network. In addition to the possibility to communicate and to provide personal data, several OSNs allow for browsing the social graph and for searching content of other users. To benefit from the accumulated knowledge of the social graph in secure and privacy-preserving OSNs like Vegas, the second part of this thesis addresses the development and the analysis of intelligent prioritization strategies for query forwarding in decentralized OSNs. In context of OSNs, the evaluation of new algorithms and protocols takes place through simulation which is based on crawling data of an OSN. Obviously crawling secure and privacy-preserving OSNs like Vegas is not possible. Therefore the third part of this thesis presents a generic model to synthesize social interaction graphs. Besides structural characteristics of centralized and decentralized OSNs, the model also considers the interaction behavior of its users. Its applicability is evaluated on the basis of social graph crawling data