Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlays for NATed Churn Intensive Networks

The wide-spread coverage and ubiquitous presence of mobile networks has propelled the usage and adoption of mobile phones to an unprecedented level around the globe. The computing capabilities of these mobile phones have improved considerably, supporting a vast range of third party applications. Simultaneously, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks have experienced a tremendous growth in terms of usage as well as popularity in recent years particularly in fixed wired networks. In particular, Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based Structured P2P overlay networks offer major advantages to users of mobile devices and networks such as scalable, fault tolerant and self-managing infrastructure which does not exhibit single points of failure. Integrating P2P overlays on the mobile network seems a logical progression; considering the popularities of both technologies. However, it imposes several challenges that need to be handled, such as the limited hardware capabilities of mobile phones and churn (i.e. the frequent join and leave of nodes within a network) intensive mobile networks offering limited yet expensive bandwidth availability. This thesis investigates the feasibility of extending P2P to mobile networks so that users can take advantage of both these technologies: P2P and mobile networks. This thesis utilises OverSim, a P2P simulator, to experiment with the performance of various P2P overlays, considering high churn and bandwidth consumption which are the two most crucial constraints of mobile networks. The experiment results show that Kademlia and EpiChord are the two most appropriate P2P overlays that could be implemented in mobile networks. Furthermore, Network Address Translation (NAT) is a major barrier to the adoption of P2P overlays in mobile networks. Integrating NAT traversal approaches with P2P overlays is a crucial step for P2P overlays to operate successfully on mobile networks. This thesis presents a general approach of NAT traversal for ring based overlays without the use of a single dedicated server which is then implemented in OverSim. Several experiments have been performed under NATs to determine the suitability of the chosen P2P overlays under NATed environments. The results show that the performance of these overlays is comparable in terms of successful lookups in both NATed and non-NATed environments; with Kademlia and EpiChord exhibiting the best performance. The presence of NATs and also the level of churn in a network influence the routing techniques used in P2P overlays. Recursive routing is more resilient to IP connectivity restrictions posed by NATs but not very robust in high churn environments, whereas iterative routing is more suitable to high churn networks, but difficult to use in NATed environments. Kademlia supports both these routing schemes whereas EpiChord only supports the iterating routing. This undermines the usefulness of EpiChord in NATed environments. In order to harness the advantages of both routing schemes, this thesis presents an adaptive routing scheme, called Churn Aware Routing Protocol (ChARP), combining recursive and iterative lookups where nodes can switch between recursive and iterative routing depending on their lifetimes. The proposed approach has been implemented in OverSim and several experiments have been carried out. The experiment results indicate an improved performance which in turn validates the applicability and suitability of ChARP in NATed environments

Network Address Translator Traversal for the Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol on Mobile Phones

Osoitteenmuuntajat sallivat useiden isäntäkoneiden jakavan yhden tai useamman IP osoitteen. Päätös käyttää osoitteenmuuntajia yhtenä ratkaisuna IP osoitteiden ehtymiseen, on myöhemmin tuonut mukanaan lisähaasteita; osoitteenmuuntajat ovat erityisen ongelmallisia vertaisyhteyksille. ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) on osoitteenmuuntajien läpäisymenetelmä, joka auttaa vertaiskoneita luomaan suoran polun osoitteenmuuntajien läsnä ollessa. ICE perustuu suurilta osin STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) ja TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT) -protokolliin. Nykyään vertaissovellukset ovat levinneet matkapuhelimiin, joilla voi myös olla osoitemuutettu osoite. Matkapuhelinten rajoitukset tietäen, on kiinnostavaa tietää osoitteenmuuntajien läpäisymenetelmien soveltuvuus matkapuhelimille P2PSIP:n (Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol) yhteydessä. SIP:iä käytettiin kommunikointi-istuntojen hallintaan vertaiskoneiden välillä. Toteutimme ICE-prototyypin mitataksemme STUN tai TURN asiakkaana tai palvelimena toimivan matkapuhelimen suorituskykyä huomioiden keskusyksikön kuorman, muistinkäytön, pakettien pudotusmäärän ja akun kulutuksen. Lisäksi työssä tutkittiin ICE:n vaikutusta P2PSIP:n viiveisiin. TURN välityspalvelimen käytön haittapuoli on kasvanut viive ja STUN koteloinnista johtuvat ylimääräiset tavut. Puhelimessa toimivan TURN palvelimen tulee rajoittaa asiakkaiden määrä sekä millaista dataa se voi välittää. Puhelin toimii hyvin STUN palvelimena, etenkin jos yhteyden ylläpitoviestit voidaan jättää huomiotta. Puhelimet voivat toimia osana P2PSIP-verkkoa myös osoitteenmuuntajien läsnä ollessa. On kuitenkin suotavaa, että osoitteenmuuntajat käyttäisivät osoite- ja porttiriippumatonta kuvausta, koska silloin välitystä ei tarvita.Network Address Translators (NATs) allow multiple hosts to share one or more IP addresses. The initial decision to use NATs as one of the solutions to Internet Protocol (IP) address depletion, has later induced further challenges; NATs are specially problematic in connection with peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a NAT traversal mechanism that helps peers in creating a direct path in the presence of NATs. ICE largely relies upon utilizing the mechanisms of Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) and Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) protocols. Nowadays P2P applications are speading to mobile phones that can also have a NATed address. Knowing the constraints of mobile phones, we were interested in the applicability of NAT traversal mechanisms for mobile phones in the context of Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP). SIP was used for controlling communication sessions between the peers. We implemented an ICE prototype for measuring CPU load, memory consumption, packet drop rate and battery consumption of a mobile phone acting as a STUN or TURN client or server. Additionally, we measured the impact of ICE on delays in P2PSIP. The downside of relaying messages via a TURN server is the increase in delay and the increased overhead due to STUN encapsulation. A TURN server running on a mobile phone has to limit the number of allocations and the type of data being transmitted through it. A mobile phone works well as STUN server, especially if keepalives can simply be ignored. Mobile phones can act as P2PSIP peers and TURN servers, even in the presence of NATs, however, it is preferable to have NATs using address and port-independent mapping, since then no relaying is needed. [

A Peer-to-Peer Network Framework Utilising the Public Mobile Telephone Network

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technologies are well established and have now become accepted as a mainstream networking approach. However, the explosion of participating users has not been replicated within the mobile networking domain. Until recently the lack of suitable hardware and wireless network infrastructure to support P2P activities was perceived as contributing to the problem. This has changed with ready availability of handsets having ample processing resources utilising an almost ubiquitous mobile telephone network. Coupled with this has been a proliferation of software applications written for the more capable `smartphone' handsets. P2P systems have not naturally integrated and evolved into the mobile telephone ecosystem in a way that `client-server' operating techniques have. However as the number of clients for a particular mobile application increase, providing the `server side' data storage infrastructure becomes more onerous. P2P systems offer mobile telephone applications a way to circumvent this data storage issue by dispersing it across a network of the participating users handsets. The main goal of this work was to produce a P2P Application Framework that supports developers in creating mobile telephone applications that use distributed storage. Effort was assigned to determining appropriate design requirements for a mobile handset based P2P system. Some of these requirements are related to the limitations of the host hardware, such as power consumption. Others relate to the network upon which the handsets operate, such as connectivity. The thesis reviews current P2P technologies to assess which was viable to form the technology foundations for the framework. The aim was not to re-invent a P2P system design, rather to adopt an existing one for mobile operation. Built upon the foundations of a prototype application, the P2P framework resulting from modifications and enhancements grants access via a simple API (Applications Programmer Interface) to a subset of Nokia `smartphone' devices. Unhindered operation across all mobile telephone networks is possible through a proprietary application implementing NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal techniques. Recognising that handsets operate with limited resources, further optimisation of the P2P framework was also investigated. Energy consumption was a parameter chosen for further examination because of its impact on handset participation time. This work has proven that operating applications in conjunction with a P2P data storage framework, connected via the mobile telephone network, is technically feasible. It also shows that opportunity remains for further research to realise the full potential of this data storage technique

A lightweight distributed super peer election algorithm for unstructured dynamic P2P systems

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresNowadays with the current growth of information exchange, and the increasing mobility of devices, it becomes essential to use technology to monitor this development. For that P2P networks are used, the exchange of information between agencies is facilitated, these now being applied in mobile networks, including MANETs, where they have special features such as the fact that they are semi-centralized, where it takes peers more ability to make a greater role in the network. But those peer with more capacity, which are used in the optimization of various parameters of these systems, such as optimization\to research, are difficult to identify due to the fact that the network does not have a fixed topology, be constantly changing, (we like to go online and offline, to change position, etc.) and not to allow the exchange of large messages. To this end, this thesis proposes a distributed election algorithm of us greater capacity among several possible goals, enhance research in the network. This includes distinguishing characteristics, such as election without global knowledge network, minimal exchange of messages, distributed decision made without dependence on us and the possibility of influencing the election outcome as the special needs of the network

Location-aware mechanism for efficient video delivery over wireless mesh networks

Due to their flexibility, ease of use, low-cost and fast deployment, wireless Mesh Networks have been widely accepted as an alternative to wired network for last-mile connectivity. When used in conjunction with Peer-to-Peer data transfer solutions, many innovative applications and services such as distributed storage, resource sharing, live TV broadcasting or Video on Demand can be supported without any centralized administration. However, in order to achieve a good quality of service in such variable, error-prone and resource-constrained wireless multi-hop environments, it is important that the associated Peer-to-Peer overlay is not only aware of the availability, but also of the location and available path link quality of its peers and services. This thesis proposes a wireless location-aware Chord-based overlay mechanism for Wireless Mesh Networks (WILCO) based on a novel geographical multi-level ID mapping and an improved finger table. The proposed scheme exploits the location information of mesh routers to decrease the number of hops the overlay messages traverse in the physical topology. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that in comparison to the original Chord, WILCO has significant benefits: it reduces the number of lookup messages, has symmetric lookup on keys in both the forward and backward direction of the Chord ring and achieves a stretch factor of O(1). On top of this location-aware overlay, a WILCO-based novel video segment seeking algorithm is proposed to make use of the multi-level WILCO ID location-awareness to locate and retrieve requested video segments from the nearest peer in order to improve video quality. An enhanced version of WILCO segment seeking algorithm (WILCO+) is proposed to mitigate the sometimes suboptimal selection of the WILCO video segment seeking algorithm by extracting coordinates from WILCO ID to enable location-awareness. Analytical and simulation results illustrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing state-of-the-art solutions in terms of PSNR and packet loss with different background traffic loads. While hop count is frequently strongly correlated to Quality of Service, the link quality of the underlying network will also have a strong influence on content retrieval quality. As a result, a Cross-layer Wireless Link Quality-aware Overlay peer selection mechanism (WLO) is proposed. The proposed cross-layer mechanism uses a Multiplication Selector Metric (MSM) to select the best overlay peer. The proposed MSM overcomes the two issues facing the traditional summation-based metric, namely, the difficulty of bottleneck link identification and the influence of hop count on behavior. Simulation results show that WLO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art solutions in terms of video quality at different background loads and levels of topology incompleteness. Real life emulation-based tests and subjective video quality assessments are also performed to show that the simulation results are closely matched by the real-life emulation-based results and to illustrate the significant impact of overlay peer selection on the user perceived video quality

Simulating a Mobile Peer-to-Peer Network

Vertaisverkkosovellukset (P2P-sovellukset) ovat saapuneet kannettaviin laitteisiin, kun laitteiden prosessoriteho, tallennuskapasiteetti sekä matkapuhelinverkkojen kaistanleveys on kasvanut. Perinteiset P2P-sovellukset ovat liian raskaita mobiilikäyttöön. Uusia, kevyempiä vertaisverkkoprotokollia tarvitaan mahdollistamaan P2P-sovellusten toiminta mobiiliympäristössä. P2P Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) on kehitteillä oleva protokolla, jonka avulla SIP protokollan yhteydenmuodostus toteutetaan ilman palvelimia. Tämän työn tavoitteena oli simuloinnin avulla tutkia Resource Location and Delivery (RELOAD) vertaisprotokollaa käyttävää P2PSIP päällysverkkoa. Tarkastelun kohteena olivat erityisesti kaistanleveyden tarve, hakujen kustannukset sekä hakujen onnistuminen. Myös solmujen päällysverkkoon liittymisestä ja päällysverkosta poistumisesta aiheutuvat vaikutukset tuloksiin olivat mielenkiinnon kohteina. Tämä työ vertailee kahden hajautetun tiivistetaulualgoritmin, Chordin ja Kademlian, suorituskykyä. Simulaatiot on suoritettu C++ ohjelmointikielellä toteutetulla OverSimpäällysverkkosimulaattorilla. Tämä työ osoittaa, että 2G-matkapuhelinverkon kaistanleveys on riittävä P2PSIPpäällysverkon tarpeisiin. Kademliaa käytettäessä kaistanleveys on suurempi, mutta hakujen viive pienempi ja onnistumisprosentti suurempi kuin Chordia käytettäessä. Tulokset osoittavat, että tässä työssä käytetyillä parametreilla hakujen onnistumisprosentti on monille sovelluksille liian alhainen eikä mahdollista niille tyydyttävää palvelun laatua.Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become available for portable devices as the processing power and the storage capacity of the devices as well as the network bandwidth have increased. The traditional P2P applications have been considered too heavy for mobile usage. New, lightweight P2P protocols are needed for mobile P2P applications. P2P Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) is a protocol under development that provides the session establishment functions of SIP in a serverless fashion. The main objective of this thesis was to simulate a P2PSIP overlay network operating with Resource Location And Delivery (RELOAD) peer protocol and study its bandwidth consumption, lookup overhead and lookup success rate. The effect of churn, the process of nodes arriving to the overlay and leaving it, on these results was also one of our concerns. We study if this kind of network is applicable to be implemented on top of current mobile telephone networks. This study compares the performance of two distributed hash table (DHT) algorithms, Chord and Kademlia. The simulations were carried out with OverSim overlay network simulator implemented in the C++ programming language. This study shows that P2PSIP network's bandwidth usage is low enough to operate on top of the 2G mobile telephone networks. Kademlia uses more bandwidth than Chord but it has a shorter lookup delay and a higher lookup success rate than Chord. The results show that with the parameter settings used in our study the lookup success rates are in general too low for many applications to give them a satisfying quality of service

Towards video streaming in IoT environments: vehicular communication perspective

Multimedia oriented Internet of Things (IoT) enables pervasive and real-time communication of video, audio and image data among devices in an immediate surroundings. Today's vehicles have the capability of supporting real time multimedia acquisition. Vehicles with high illuminating infrared cameras and customized sensors can communicate with other on-road devices using dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and 5G enabled communication technologies. Real time incidence of both urban and highway vehicular traffic environment can be captured and transmitted using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication modes. Video streaming in vehicular IoT (VSV-IoT) environments is in growing stage with several challenges that need to be addressed ranging from limited resources in IoT devices, intermittent connection in vehicular networks, heterogeneous devices, dynamism and scalability in video encoding, bandwidth underutilization in video delivery, and attaining application-precise quality of service in video streaming. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive review on video streaming in IoT environments focusing on vehicular communication perspective. Specifically, significance of video streaming in vehicular IoT environments is highlighted focusing on integration of vehicular communication with 5G enabled IoT technologies, and smart city oriented application areas for VSV-IoT. A taxonomy is presented for the classification of related literature on video streaming in vehicular network environments. Following the taxonomy, critical review of literature is performed focusing on major functional model, strengths and weaknesses. Metrics for video streaming in vehicular IoT environments are derived and comparatively analyzed in terms of their usage and evaluation capabilities. Open research challenges in VSV-IoT are identified as future directions of research in the area. The survey would benefit both IoT and vehicle industry practitioners and researchers, in terms of augmenting understanding of vehicular video streaming and its IoT related trends and issues