Reducing the Download Time in Stochastic P2P Content Delivery Networks by Improving Peer Selection

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become a popular method for obtaining digital content. Recent research has shown that the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer effects the total download duration. Current peer selection strategies attempt to limit the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer, but they do not use both advanced knowledge and service capacity after the connection has been made to aid in peer selection. Advanced knowledge has traditionally been obtained from methods that add additional overhead to the P2P network, such as polling peers for service capacity information, using round trip time techniques to calculate the distance between peers, and by using tracker peers. This work investigated the creation of a new download strategy that replaced the random selection of peers with a method that selects server peers based on historic service capacity and ISP in order to further reduce the amount of time needed to complete a download session. Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become a popular method for obtaining digital content. Recent research has shown that the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer effects the total download duration. Current peer selection strategies attempt to limit the amount of time spent downloading from a poor performing peer, but they do not use both advanced knowledge and service capacity after the connection has been made to aid in peer selection. Advanced knowledge has traditionally been obtained from methods that add additional overhead to the P2P network, such as polling peers for service capacity information, using round trip time techniques to calculate the distance between peers, and by using tracker peers. This work investigated the creation of a new download strategy that replaced the random selection of peers with a method that selects server peers based on historic service capacity and ISP in order to further reduce the amount of time needed to complete a download session. The results of this new historic based peer selection strategy have shown that there are benefits in using advanced knowledge to select peers and only replacing the worst performing peers. This new approach showed an average download duration improvement of 16.6% in the single client simulation and an average cross ISP traffic reduction of 55.17% when ISPs were participating in cross ISP throttling. In the multiple clients simulation the new approach showed an average download duration improvement of 53.31% and an average cross ISP traffic reduction of 88.83% when ISPs were participating in cross ISP throttling. This new approach also significantly improved the consistency of the download duration between download sessions allowing for the more accurate prediction of download times

Fewest Common Hops (FCH): An Improved Peer Selection Approach for P2P Applications

Underlay-unawareness in P2P systems can result in sub-optimal peer selection for overlay routing and hence poor performance. The majority of underlay aware proposals for peer selection focus on finding the shortest overlay routes by selecting the nearest peers according to proximity. However, in case of multiple and parallel downloads, if the underlay paths between a downloader and its selected nearest peers share a bottleneck, this can cause congestion, leading to performance deterioration instead of improvement. This effect was neglected in previous work because, in today's Internet, the bottleneck is usually not shared as it is the end user's access link. This is no longer the case in more modern scenarios, e.g. with FTTH or with upcoming in-network caching techniques such as DECADE. We propose an improved peer selection approach for P2P applications called Fewest Common Hops (FCH) that ensures proximity based node selection having maximum path disjointness. It is a client based, infrastructure independent heuristic to optimize download time for multiple and parallel downloads in P2P content distribution applications. Simulations show that, even when FCH is implemented in the simplest possible fashion (using only traceroute), it can significantly decrease the download time. © 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works

Fewest common hops (FCH) : an improved peer selection approach for P2P applications

Underlay-unawareness in P2P systems can result in sub-optimal peer selection for overlay routing and hence poor performance. The majority of underlay aware proposals for peer selection focus on finding the shortest overlay routes by selecting the nearest peers according to proximity. However, in case of multiple and parallel downloads, if the underlay paths between a client and its selected nearest peers share a bottleneck, this can cause congestion, leading to performance deterioration instead of improvement. This effect was neglected in previous work because, in todays Internet, the bottleneck is usually not shared as it is the end users uplink. This is no longer the case in more modern scenarios such as FTTH or upcoming in-network caching techniques such as DECADE. To address the above problem, this thesis proposes an improved peer selection approach for P2P applications called Fewest Common Hops (FCH) that ensures proximity based node selection having maximum path disjointness. It is a client based, infrastructure independent heuristic to optimize download speed for multiple and parallel downloads in P2P content distribution applications. FCH was simulated for multiple downloads in a proximity based P2P application “Pas-try”with two underlay Models, “Rease”and “INET”. For parallel downloads FCH was simulated in BitTorrent. Simulations show that, even when FCH is implemented in the simplest possible fashion (using only ping), it can significantly decrease the download time. In general, the use of proximity along with path-disjointedness for peer selection decreases the file download time and increases network utilization in both homogeneous and heterogeneous situations.by Humaira IjazUniversität Innsbruck, Dissertation, 2016OeBB(VLID)152097