Self-Healing Protocols for Connectivity Maintenance in Unstructured Overlays

In this paper, we discuss on the use of self-organizing protocols to improve the reliability of dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks. Two similar approaches are studied, which are based on local knowledge of the nodes' 2nd neighborhood. The first scheme is a simple protocol requiring interactions among nodes and their direct neighbors. The second scheme adds a check on the Edge Clustering Coefficient (ECC), a local measure that allows determining edges connecting different clusters in the network. The performed simulation assessment evaluates these protocols over uniform networks, clustered networks and scale-free networks. Different failure modes are considered. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.Comment: The paper has been accepted to the journal Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12083-015-0384-

Leveraging P2P overlays for Large-scale and Highly Robust Content Distribution and Search

International audienceIn the last decade, there has been a tendency of shifting content distribution towards peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. The reason behind this is the self-scalability of P2P systems provided by the principles of communal collaboration and resource sharing in P2P systems. By building a P2P Content Distribution Network}(CDN), peers collaborate to distribute the content of under-provisioned websites and to serve queries for large audiences on behalf of the websites. When designing a P2P CDN, the main challenge is to actually maintain an acceptable level of performance in terms of client-perceived latency and hit ratio while minimizing the incurred overhead. This is not a straightforward endeavor given that the P2P CDN relies on autonomous and dynamic peers rather than a dedicated infrastructure. Indeed, the distribution of duties and content over peers should take into account their interests in order to give them proper incentives to cooperate. Moreover, the P2P-CDN should adapt to increasing numbers of participants and provide robust algorithms under high levels of churn because these issues have a key impact on performance. Finally, the routing of queries should aim peers close in locality and serve content from close-by providers to achieve short latencies. This paper gives an overview of our contributions in designing and maintaining a P2P CDN that tackles the issues identified above. First, we present Flower-CDN, a P2P content distribution network (CDN) that tackles some of these issues. Peers store only content of websites they are interested in and serve them to others. Furthermore, peers can find close-by content providers by a locality aware P2P directory structure. Secondly, we present a highly scalable approach of Flower-CDN called PetalUp-CDN which dynamically adjusts the directory structure in order to avoid overload situations and to keep the index information any peer must maintain at an acceptable level. Thirdly, we discuss maintenance protocols for Flower-CDN and PetalUp-CDN to cope with the worst scenarios of churn. The performance evaluation wrt. scalability and churn management shows that our generic approach enhances hit ratio by 40% and reduces response time by a factor of 12, compared to a well-known P2P-CDN

Enabling Internet-Scale Publish/Subscribe In Overlay Networks

As the amount of data in todays Internet is growing larger, users are exposed to too much information, which becomes increasingly more difficult to comprehend. Publish/subscribe systems leverage this problem by providing loosely-coupled communications between producers and consumers of data in a network. Data consumers, i.e., subscribers, are provided with a subscription mechanism, to express their interests in a subset of data, in order to be notified only when some data that matches their subscription is generated by the producers, i.e., publishers. Most publish/subscribe systems today, are based on the client/server architectural model. However, to provide the publish/subscribe service in large scale, companies either have to invest huge amount of money for over-provisioning the resources, or are prone to frequent service failures. Peer-to-peer overlay networks are attractive alternative solutions for building Internet-scale publish/subscribe systems. However, scalability comes with a cost: a published message often needs to traverse a large number of uninterested (unsubscribed) nodes before reaching all its subscribers. We refer to this undesirable traffic, as relay overhead. Without careful considerations, the relay overhead might sharply increase resource consumption for the relay nodes (in terms of bandwidth transmission cost, CPU, etc) and could ultimately lead to rapid deterioration of the system’s performance once the relay nodes start dropping the messages or choose to permanently abandon the system. To mitigate this problem, some solutions use unbounded number of connections per node, while some other limit the expressiveness of the subscription scheme. In this thesis work, we introduce two systems called Vitis and Vinifera, for topic-based and content-based publish/subscribe models, respectively. Both these systems are gossip-based and significantly decrease the relay overhead. We utilize novel techniques to cluster together nodes that exhibit similar subscriptions. In the topic-based model, distinct clusters for each topic are constructed, while clusters in the content-based model are fuzzy and do not have explicit boundaries. We augment these clustered overlays by links that facilitate routing in the network. We construct a hybrid system by injecting structure into an otherwise unstructured network. The resulting structures resemble navigable small-world networks, which spans along clusters of nodes that have similar subscriptions. The properties of such overlays make them an ideal platform for efficient data dissemination in large-scale systems. The systems requires only a bounded node degree and as we show, through simulations, they scale well with the number of nodes and subscriptions and remain efficient under highly complex subscription patterns, high publication rates, and even in the presence of failures in the network. We also compare both systems against some state-of-the-art publish/subscribe systems. Our measurements show that both Vitis and Vinifera significantly outperform their counterparts on various subscription and churn scenarios, under both synthetic workloads and real-world traces

A Highly Robust P2P-CDN Under Large-Scale and Dynamic Participation

International audienceBy building a P2P Content Distribution Network (CDN), peers collaborate to distribute the content of under-provisioned websites and to serve queries for larger audiences on behalf of the websites. This can reveal very challenging, given the highly dynamic and autonomous participation of peers. Indeed, the P2P-CDN should adapt to increasing numbers of participants and provide robust algorithms under churn because these issues have a key impact on performance. Also, the distribution of tasks and content over peers should take into account their interests in order to give them proper incentives to cooperate. Finally, the routing of queries should aim peers close in locality and serve content from close-by providers to reduce network overload and achieve scalability. We have previously proposed a locality and interest-aware P2P-CDN, Flower-CDN, that lacks efficient management of robustness and scalability. In this paper, we focus on these crucial shortcomings and propose PetalUp-CDN. The performance evaluation with respect to scalability and churn shows highly significant gains

Resilience Strategies for Network Challenge Detection, Identification and Remediation

The enormous growth of the Internet and its use in everyday life make it an attractive target for malicious users. As the network becomes more complex and sophisticated it becomes more vulnerable to attack. There is a pressing need for the future internet to be resilient, manageable and secure. Our research is on distributed challenge detection and is part of the EU Resumenet Project (Resilience and Survivability for Future Networking: Framework, Mechanisms and Experimental Evaluation). It aims to make networks more resilient to a wide range of challenges including malicious attacks, misconfiguration, faults, and operational overloads. Resilience means the ability of the network to provide an acceptable level of service in the face of significant challenges; it is a superset of commonly used definitions for survivability, dependability, and fault tolerance. Our proposed resilience strategy could detect a challenge situation by identifying an occurrence and impact in real time, then initiating appropriate remedial action. Action is autonomously taken to continue operations as much as possible and to mitigate the damage, and allowing an acceptable level of service to be maintained. The contribution of our work is the ability to mitigate a challenge as early as possible and rapidly detect its root cause. Also our proposed multi-stage policy based challenge detection system identifies both the existing and unforeseen challenges. This has been studied and demonstrated with an unknown worm attack. Our multi stage approach reduces the computation complexity compared to the traditional single stage, where one particular managed object is responsible for all the functions. The approach we propose in this thesis has the flexibility, scalability, adaptability, reproducibility and extensibility needed to assist in the identification and remediation of many future network challenges

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

Content Distribution in P2P Systems

The report provides a literature review of the state-of-the-art for content distribution. The report's contributions are of threefold. First, it gives more insight into traditional Content Distribution Networks (CDN), their requirements and open issues. Second, it discusses Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems as a cheap and scalable alternative for CDN and extracts their design challenges. Finally, it evaluates the existing P2P systems dedicated for content distribution according to the identied requirements and challenges