Abstract

Over the past several years, peer-to-peer systems have generated many head-lines across several application domains. The increased popularity of these sys-tems has led researchers to study their overall performance and their impact on the underlying Internet. The unanticipated growth in popularity of peer-to-peer systems has raised a number of significant problems. For example, network degra-dation can be observed as well as loss of connectivity between nodes in some cases, making the overlay application unusable. As a result many peer-to-peer systems can not offer sufficient reliability in support of their applications. This thesis addresses the problem of the lack of reliability in peer-to-peer networks, and proposes a number of algorithms that can provide reliability guarantees to peer-to-peer applications. Note that reliability in a peer-to-peer networking context is different from TCP type reliability. We define a reliable peer-to-peer as a network that is resilient to changes such as network dynamics, and can offer participating peers increased performance when possible. We make the following contributions to area of peer-to-peer reliability:

Citations