Storage and Search in Dynamic Peer-to-Peer Networks

We study robust and efficient distributed algorithms for searching, storing, and maintaining data in dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. P2P networks are highly dynamic networks that experience heavy node churn (i.e., nodes join and leave the network continuously over time). Our goal is to guarantee, despite high node churn rate, that a large number of nodes in the network can store, retrieve, and maintain a large number of data items. Our main contributions are fast randomized distributed algorithms that guarantee the above with high probability (whp) even under high adversarial churn: 1. A randomized distributed search algorithm that (whp) guarantees that searches from as many as $n - o(n)$ nodes ($n$ is the stable network size) succeed in ${O}(\log n)$-rounds despite ${O}(n/\log^{1+\delta} n)$ churn, for any small constant $\delta > 0$, per round. We assume that the churn is controlled by an oblivious adversary (that has complete knowledge and control of what nodes join and leave and at what time, but is oblivious to the random choices made by the algorithm). 2. A storage and maintenance algorithm that guarantees (whp) data items can be efficiently stored (with only $\Theta(\log{n})$ copies of each data item) and maintained in a dynamic P2P network with churn rate up to ${O}(n/\log^{1+\delta} n)$ per round. Our search algorithm together with our storage and maintenance algorithm guarantees that as many as $n - o(n)$ nodes can efficiently store, maintain, and search even under ${O}(n/\log^{1+\delta} n)$ churn per round. Our algorithms require only polylogarithmic in $n$ bits to be processed and sent (per round) by each node. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithms are the first-known, fully-distributed storage and search algorithms that provably work under highly dynamic settings (i.e., high churn rates per step).Comment: to appear at SPAA 201

The robustness of stability under link and node failures

AbstractIn the area of communication systems, stability refers to the property of keeping the amount of traffic in the system always bounded over time. Different communication system models have been proposed in order to capture the unpredictable behavior of some users and applications. Among those proposed models the adversarial queueing theory (aqt) model turned out to be the most adequate to analyze an unpredictable network. Until now, most of the research done in this field did not consider the possibility of the adversary producing failures on the network structure. The adversarial models proposed in this work incorporate the possibility of dealing with node and link failures provoked by the adversary. Such failures produce temporal disruptions of the connectivity of the system and increase the collisions of packets in the intermediate hosts of the network, and thus the average traffic load. Under such a scenario, the network is required to be equipped with some mechanism for dealing with those collisions.In addition to proposing adversarial models for faulty systems we study the relation between the robustness of the stability of the system and the management of the queues affected by the failures. When the adversary produces link or node failures the queues associated to the corresponding links can be affected in many different ways depending on whether they can receive or serve packets, or rather that they cannot. In most of the cases, protocols and networks containing very simple topologies, which were known to be universally stable in the aqt model, turn out to be unstable under some of the newly proposed adversarial models. This shows that universal stability of networks is not a robust property in the presence of failures

Simple Routing Strategies for Adversarial Systems

In this paper we consider the problem of delivering dynamically changing input streams in dynamically changing networks where both the topology and the input streams can change in an unpredictable way. In particular, we present two simple distributed balancing algorithms (one for packet injections and one for flow injections) and show that for the case of a single receiver these algorithms will always ensure that the number of packets in the system is bounded at any time step, even for an injection process that completely saturates the capacities of the available edges, and even if the network topology changes in a completely unpredictable way. We also show that the maximum number of packets or flow that can be in the system at any time is best possible by providing an (essentially) matching lower bound that holds for any online algorithm, whether distributed or not. Interestingly, our balancing algorithms do not only behave well in a completely adversarial setting. We show that also in the other extreme of a static network and a static injection pattern the algorithms will converge to a point in which they achieve an average routing time that is close to the best possible average routing time that can be achieved by any strategy. This demonstrates that there are simple algorithms that can be efficient at the same time for very different communication scenarios. To have such algorithms will be of particular importance for communication in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (or short MANETs), in which at some time the connections between mobile nodes and/or the rates of input streams may change quickly and unpredictably and at some other time may be quasi static. Supported by DARPA grant F306020020550 "A Cost Benefit Approach to Fault Tolerant Communicati..