Abstract Decentralized and unstructured peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella are attractive for certain applicationsbecause they require no centralized directories and no precise control over network topologies and data placement. However, the flooding-based query algorithm used in Gnutella does not scale; each individual query gener-ates a large amount of traffic and, as it grows, the system quickly becomes overwhelmed with the query-induced load. This paper explores, through simulation, various alternatives to gnutella's query algorithm, data replicationmethod, and network topology. We propose a query algorithm based on multiple random walks that resolves queries almost as quickly as gnutella's flooding method while reducing the network traffic by two orders of mag-nitude in many cases. We also present a distributed replication strategy that yields close-to-optimal performance. Finally, we find that among the various network topologies we consider, uniform random graphs yield the bestperformance. 1 Introduction The computer science community has become accustomed to the Internet's continuing rapid growth, but even tosuch jaded observers the explosive increase in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network usage has been astounding. Within a few months of Napster's [12] introduction in 1999 the system had spread widely, and recent measurement data suggeststhat P2P applications are having a very significant and rapidly growing impact on Internet traffic [11, 15]. Therefore, it is important to study the performance and scalability of these P2P networks. Currently, there are several different architectures for P2P networks:

Abstract—The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications is growing dramatically, particularly for sharing large video/audio files and software. In this paper, we analyze P2P traffic by measuring flowlevel information collected at multiple border routers across a large ISP network, and report our investigation of three popular P2P systems—FastTrack, Gnutella, and Direct-Connect. We characterize the P2P trafffic observed at a single ISP and its impact on the underlying network. We observe very skewed distribution in the traffic across the network at different levels of spatial aggregation (IP, prefix, AS). All three P2P systems exhibit significant dynamics at short time scale and particularly at the IP address level. Still, the fraction of P2P traffic contributed by each prefix is more stable than the corresponding distribution of either Web traffic or overall traffic. The high volume and good stability properties of P2P traffic suggests that the P2P workload is a good candidate for being managed via application-specific layer-3 traffic engineering in an ISP’s network. Index Terms—File sharing, peer-to-peer, P2P, traffic characterization, traffic measurement.

Despite recent excitement generated by the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm and the surprisingly rapid deployment of some P2P applications, there are few quantitative evaluations of P2P systems behavior. The open architecture, achieved scale, and self-organizing structure of the Gnutella network make it an interesting P2P architecture to study. Like most other P2P applications, Gnutella builds, at the application level, a virtual network with its own routing mechanisms. The topology of this virtual network and the routing mechanisms used have a significant influence on application properties such as performance, reliability, and scalability. We have built a “crawler” to extract the topology of Gnutella’s application level network. In this paper we analyze the topology graph and evaluate generated network traffic. Our two major findings are that: (1) although Gnutella is not a pure power-law network, its current configuration has the benefits and drawbacks of a power-law structure, and (2) the Gnutella virtual network topology does not match well the underlying Internet topology, hence leading to ineffective use of the physical networking infrastructure. These findings guide us to propose changes to the Gnutella protocol and implementations that may bring significant performance and scalability improvements. We believe that our findings as well as our measurement and analysis techniques have broad applicability to P2P systems and provide unique insights into P2P system design tradeoffs.

Despite recent excitement generated by the P2P paradigm and despite surprisingly fast deployment of some P2P applications, there are few quantitative evaluations of P2P systems behavior. Due to its' open architecture and achieved scale, Gnutella is an interesting P2P architecture case study. Gnutella, like most other P2P applications, builds' at the application level a virtual network with its' own routing mechanisms. The topology of this virtual network and the routing mechanisms used have a significant influence on application properties such as performance, reliability, and scalability. We built a 'crawler' to extract the topology of Gnutella's application level network. In this' paper we analyze the topology graph and evaluate generated network traffic. We find that although Gnutella is' not a pure power-law network, its' current configuration has the benefits' and drawbacks' of a power-law structure. These findings lead us to propose changes to Gnutella protocol and implementations that bring significant performance and scalability improvements'.

this paper, we assume that c i denotes the maximum number of messages node i is willing/able to process over a given time interval T . A node i is connected, at the application-level, to a set of neighbor nodes, denoted nbr(i). For each of j 2 nbr(i) a node i maintains the following information: in[j; i]: the number of incoming messages from node j to i in the last time interval T . Every node i reports its total incoming rate (in[; i] = j2nbr(i) in[j; i]) to all its neighbors

During recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems have evolved in many ways to accommodate growing numbers of participating peers. In particular, new features have changed the properties of the unstructured overlay topology formed by these peers. Despite their importance, little is known about the characteristics of these topologies and their dynamics in modern file-sharing applications. This paper presents a detailed characterization of P2P overlay topologies and their dynamics, focusing on the modern Gnutella network. Using our fast and accurate P2P crawler, we capture a complete snapshot of the Gnutella network with more than one million peers in just a few minutes. Leveraging more than 18,000 recent overlay snapshots, we characterize the graph-related properties of individual overlay snapshots and overlay dynamics across hundreds of back-to-back snapshots. We show how inaccuracy in snapshots can lead to erroneous conclusions—such as a power-law degree distribution. Our results reveal that while the Gnutella network has dramatically grown and changed in many ways, it still exhibits the clustering and short path lengths of a small world network. Furthermore, its overlay topology is highly resilient to random peer departure and even systematic attacks. More interestingly, overlay dynamics lead to an “onion-like ” biased connectivity among peers where each peer is more likely connected to peers with higher uptime. Therefore, long-lived peers form a stable core that ensures reachability among peers despite overlay dynamics. 1

This paper studies the problem of updates in decentralised and self-organising P2P systems in which peers have low online probabilities and only local knowledge. The update strategy we propose for this environment is based on a hybrid push/pull rumor spreading algorithm and provides a fully decentralised, efficient and robust communication scheme which offers probabilistic guarantees rather than ensuring strict consistency. We describe a generic analytical model to investigate the utility of our hybrid update propagation scheme from the perspective of communication overhead.

Despite recent excitement generated by the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm and the surprisingly rapid deployment of some P2P applications, there are few quantitative structure of the Gnutella network make it an interesting P2P architecture to study. Like most other P2P applications, Gnutella builds, at the application level, a virtual network with its own routing mechanisms. The topology of this overlay network and the routing mechanisms used have a significant influence on application properties such as performance, reliability, and scalability. We describe techniques to discover and analyze the Gnutella's overlay network topology and evaluate generated network traffic. Our major findings are: (1) although Gnutella is not a pure power-law network, its current configuration has the benefits and drawbacks of a power-law structure, (2) we estimate the aggregated volume of generated traffic, and (3) the Gnutella virtual network topology does not match well the underlying Internet topology, hence leading to ineffective use of the physical networking infrastructure. We believe that our findings as well as our measurement and analysis techniques have broad applicability to P2P systems and provide useful insights into P2P system design tradeoffs.

We consider the problem of choosing who to "befriend " among a collection of known peers in distributed P2P systems. In particular, our work explores a number of P2P protocols that, by considering peers' lifespan distribution a key attribute, can yield systems with performance characteristics more resilient to the natural instability of their environments.

Peer-to-peer computing and networking, a new model of communication and computation, has recently started to gain significant acceptance. This model not only enables clients to take a more active role in the information dissemination process, but also may significantly increase the performance and reliability of the overall system, by eliminating the traditional notion of the "server" which could be a single point of failure, and a potential bottleneck.