The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable

Fast Construction of Efficient Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlays

International audienceThis report presents algorithms for building Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) or Structured Overlays. DHTs are used as self-managing system to deal with distributed data over large networks. The provided algorithms guarantee] building Efficient DHTs by ensuring selected proper- ties, and this for the general case. Our algorithms can be mainly used in DHT-based storage systems to build efficient systems or to recover the last configuration of the systems after crash very fast

Enabling technologies for decentralized interpersonal communication

In the recent years the Internet users have witnessed the emergence of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies and applications. One class of P2P applications is comprised of applications that are targeted for interpersonal communication. The communication applications that utilize P2P technologies are referred to as decentralized interpersonal communication applications. Such applications are decentralized in a sense that they do not require assistance from centralized servers for setting up multimedia sessions between users. The invention of Distributed Hash Table (DHT) algorithms has been an important, but not an inclusive enabler for decentralized interpersonal communication. Even though the DHTs provide a basic foundation for decentralization, there are still a number of challenges without viable technological solutions. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose technological solutions to a subset of the existing challenges. In addition, this thesis also presents the preliminary work for the technological solutions. There are two parts in the preliminary work. In the first part, a set of DHT algorithms are evaluated from the viewpoint of decentralized interpersonal communication, and the second part gives a coherent presentation of the challenges that a decentralized interpersonal communication application is going to encounter in mobile networks. The technological solution proposals contain two architectures and two algorithms. The first architecture enables an interconnection between a decentralized and a centralized communication network, and the second architecture enables the decentralization of a set of legacy applications. The first algorithm is a load balancing algorithm that enables good scalability, and the second algorithm is a search algorithm that enables arbitrary searches. The algorithms can be used, for example, in DHT-based networks. Even though this thesis has focused on the decentralized interpersonal communication, some of the proposed technological solutions also have general applicability outside the scope of decentralized interpersonal communication