HSkip+: A Self-Stabilizing Overlay Network for Nodes with Heterogeneous Bandwidths

In this paper we present and analyze HSkip+, a self-stabilizing overlay network for nodes with arbitrary heterogeneous bandwidths. HSkip+ has the same topology as the Skip+ graph proposed by Jacob et al. [PODC 2009] but its self-stabilization mechanism significantly outperforms the self-stabilization mechanism proposed for Skip+. Also, the nodes are now ordered according to their bandwidths and not according to their identifiers. Various other solutions have already been proposed for overlay networks with heterogeneous bandwidths, but they are not self-stabilizing. In addition to HSkip+ being self-stabilizing, its performance is on par with the best previous bounds on the time and work for joining or leaving a network of peers of logarithmic diameter and degree and arbitrary bandwidths. Also, the dilation and congestion for routing messages is on par with the best previous bounds for such networks, so that HSkip+ combines the advantages of both worlds. Our theoretical investigations are backed by simulations demonstrating that HSkip+ is indeed performing much better than Skip+ and working correctly under high churn rates.Comment: This is a long version of a paper published by IEEE in the Proceedings of the 14-th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computin

Issues on distributed caching of spatial data

Die Menge an digitalen Informationen über Orte hat bis heute rapide zugenommen. Mit der Verbreitung mobiler, internetfähiger Geräte kann nun jederzeit und von überall auf diese Informationen zugegriffen werden. Im Zuge dieser Entwicklung wurden zahlreiche ortsbasierte Anwendungen und Dienste populär. So reihen sich digitale Einkaufsassistenten und Touristeninformationsdienste sowie geosoziale Anwendungen in der Liste der beliebtesten Vertreter. Steigende Benutzerzahlen sowie die rapide wachsenden Datenmengen, stellen ernstzunehmende Herausforderungen für die Anbieter ortsbezogener Informationen dar. So muss der Datenbereitstellungsprozess effizient gestaltet sein, um einen kosteneffizienten Betrieb zu ermöglichen. Darüber hinaus sollten Ressourcen flexibel genug zugeordnet werden können, um Lastungleichgewichte zwischen Systemkomponenten ausgleichen zu können. Außerdem müssen Datenanbieter in der Lage sein, die Verarbeitungskapazitäten mit steigender und fallender Anfragelast zu skalieren. Mit dieser Arbeit stellen wir einen verteilten Zwischenspeicher für ortsbasierte Daten vor. In dem verteilten Zwischenspeicher werden Replika der am häufigsten verwendeten Daten von mehreren unabhängigen Servern im flüchtigen Speicher vorgehalten. Mit unserem Ansatz können die Herausforderungen für Anbieter ortsbezogener Informationen wie folgt addressiert werden: Zunächst sorgt eine speziell für die Zugriffsmuster ortsbezogener Anwendungen konzipierte Zwischenspreicherungsstragie für eine Erhöhung der Gesamteffizienz, da eine erhebliche Menge der zwischengespeicherten Ergebnisse vorheriger Anfragen wiederverwendet werden kann. Darüber hinaus bewirken unsere speziell für den Geo-Kontext entwickelten Lastbalancierungsverfahren den Ausgleich dynamischer Lastungleichgewichte. Letztlich befähigen unsere verteilten Protokolle zur Hinzu- und Wegnahme von Servern die Anbieter ortsbezogener Informationen, die Verarbeitungskapazität steigender oder fallender Anfragelast anzupassen. In diesem Dokument untersuchen wir zunächst die Anforderungen der Datenbereitstellung im Kontext von ortsbasierten Anwendungen. Anschließend diskutieren wir mögliche Entwurfsmuster und leiten eine Architektur für einen verteilten Zwischenspeicher ab. Im Verlauf dieser Arbeit, entstanden mehrere konkrete Implementierungsvarianten, die wir in diesem Dokument vorstellen und miteinander vergleichen. Unsere Evaluation zeigt nicht nur die prinzipielle Machbarkeit, sondern auch die Effektivität von unserem Caching-Ansatz für die Erreichung von Skalierbarkeit und Verfügbarkeit im Kontext der Bereitstellung von ortsbasierten Daten

Structures and Algorithms for Peer-to-Peer Cooperation

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are distributed systems, without any hierarchical organization or centralized control. Peers form self-organizing overlay networks that are on top of the Internet. Both parts of this thesis deal with peer-to-peer overlay networks, the first part with unstructured ones used to build a large scale Networked Virtual Environment. The second part gives insights on how the users of a real life structured peer-to-peer network behave, and how well the proposed algorithms for publishing and retrieving data work. Moreover we analyze the security (holes) in such a system. Networked virtual environments (NVEs), also known as distributed virtual environments, are computer-generated, synthetic worlds that allow simultaneous interactions of multiple participants. Many efforts have been made to allow people to interact in realistic virtual environments, resulting in the recent boom of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In the first part of the thesis, we present a complete study of an augmented Delaunay-based overlay for peer-to-peer shared virtual worlds. We design an overlay network matching the Delaunay triangulation of the participating peers in a generalized d-dimensional space. Especially, we describe the self-organizing algorithms for peer insertion and deletion. To reduce the delay penalty of overlay routing, we propose to augment each node of the Delaunay-based overlay with a limited number of carefully selected shortcut links creating a small-world. We show that a small number of shortcuts is sufficient to significantly decrease the delay of routing in the space. We present a distributed algorithm for the clustering of peers. The algorithm is dynamic in the sense that whenever a peer joins or leaves the NVE, the clustering will be adapted if necessary by either splitting a cluster or merging clusters. The main idea of the algorithm is to classify links between adjacent peers into short intracluster and long inter-cluster links. In a structured system, the neighbor relationship between peers and data locations is strictly defined. Searching in such systems is therefore determined by the particular network architecture. Among the strictly structured systems, some implement a distributed hash table (DHT) using different data structures. DHTs have been actively studied in the literature and many different proposals have been made on how to organize peers in a DHT. However, very few DHTs have been implemented in real systems and deployed on a large scale. One exception is KAD, a DHT based on Kademlia, which is part of eDonkey, a peer-to-peer file sharing system with several million simultaneous users. In the second part of this thesis we give a detailed background on KAD, the organization of the peers, the search and the publish operations, and we describe our measurement methodology. We have been crawling KAD continuously for more than a year. We obtained information about geographical distribution of peers, session times, peer availability, and peer lifetime. We found that session times are Weibull distributed and show how this information can be exploited to make the publishing mechanism much more efficient. As we have been studying KAD over the course of the last two years we have been both, fascinated and frightened by the possibilities KAD offers. We show that mounting a Sybil attack is very easy in KAD and allows to compromise the privacy of KAD users, to compromise the correct operation of the key lookup and to mount distributed denial-of-service attacks with very little resources

Constructing efficient self-organising application layer multicast overlays

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Advanced Caching for Distributing Sensor Data through Programmable Nodes

This paper shows an innovative solution for distributing dynamic sensor data by using distributed caches. Our proposal is based on the concepts of service modularization and virtualization of network nodes made available by the NetServ hosting environment, which has been defined and implemented with the aim of extending the functions of the network nodes. Through a lab experiment involving tens of nodes, we have demonstrated a significant performance improvements in term of traffic saving and download time in comparison with a legacy, Internet-based, approach. Beyond this performance improvements, the proposed solution holds also functional improvements, in terms of dynamic deployment and easy integration with services making use of sensor data.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE LANMAN 201

A Location Aware P2P Voice Communication Protocol for Networked Virtual Environments

Multiparty voice communication, where multiple people can communicate in a group, is an important component of networked virtual environments (NVEs), especially in many types of online games. While most research has been conducted on one-to-one communication, we focus on group communication. In this dissertation, we present the first measurement study on the characteristics of multiparty voice communications and develop a model of the talking and silence periods observed during multiparty communication. Over a total of 5 months, we measured over 11,000 sessions on an active multi-party voice communication server to quantify the characteristics of communication generated by game players, including group sizes, packet distributions, user and session frequencies, and speaking (and silence) durations. Further, we develop a model for multiparty voice communication that can be used for future research, simulation, network engineering, and game development work. Next, we propose a peer-to-peer protocol that uses Gabriel graphs, a subgraph of Delaunay-triangulations, to provide scalable multiparty voice communication. In addition, our protocol uses positional information so that voice data can be accurately modeled to listeners to increase the immersiveness of their experience. Our simulations show that the algorithms scale well even in densely populated areas, while prioritizing the sending of voice packets to the closest listeners of a speaker rst, thus behaving as users expect. We also develop a security framework that prevents common attacks. Finally, we implement our protocol and put it through exhaustive validation, where we use the model that we generated using our multiparty voice communication model

Dragon: Multidimensional Range Queries on Distributed Aggregation Trees,

Distributed query processing is of paramount importance in next-generation distribution services, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems. Even if several multi-attribute range queries supports have been proposed for peer-to-peer systems, these solutions must be rethought to fully meet the requirements of new computational paradigms for IoT, like fog computing. This paper proposes dragon, an ecient support for distributed multi-dimensional range query processing targeting ecient query resolution on highly dynamic data. In dragon nodes at the edges of the network collect and publish multi-dimensional data. The nodes collectively manage an aggregation tree storing data digests which are then exploited, when resolving queries, to prune the sub-trees containing few or no relevant matches. Multi-attribute queries are managed by linearising the attribute space through space lling curves. We extensively analysed dierent aggregation and query resolution strategies in a wide spectrum of experimental set-ups. We show that dragon manages eciently fast changing data values. Further, we show that dragon resolves queries by contacting a lower number of nodes when compared to a similar approach in the state of the art

Embryomorphic Engineering: Emergent innovation through evolutionary development

Embryomorphic Engineering, a particular instance of Morpho-genetic Engineering, takes its inspiration directly from biological development to create new hardware, software or network architectures by decentralized self-assembly of elementary agents. At its core, it combines three key principles of multicellular embryogenesis: chemical gradient di usion (providing positional information to the agents), gene regulatory networks (triggering their diferentiation into types, thus patterning), and cell division (creating structural constraints, thus reshaping). This chapter illustrates the potential of Embryomorphic Engineering in di erent spaces: 2D/3D physical swarms, which can nd applications in collective robotics, synthetic biology or nan- otechnology; and nD graph topologies, which can nd applications in dis- tributed software and peer-to-peer techno-social networks. In all cases, the speci c genotype shared by all the agents makes the phenotype's complex architecture and function modular, programmable and reproducible

Constructing efficient self-organising application layer multicast overlays

This thesis investigates efficient techniques to build both low cost (i.e. low resource usage) and low delay ALM trees. We focus on self-organising distributed proposals that use limited information about the underlying physical network, limited coordination between the members, and construct overlays with bounded branching degree subject to the bandwidth constraint of each individual member