Adding structure to unstructured peer-to-peer networks: the use of small-world graphs

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Abstract

The “small-world” graph structure is pervasive and is observed to arise “without-design” or “naturally” in many practical systems such as the World Wide Web. In contrast to natural systems, overlay networks provide an opportunity to design structure. We seek the advantages of designing overlay topologies with small-world properties to support file sharing in peer-to-peer networks. We focus on two metrics of performance: (a) search protocol performance, a local gain perceived directly by peer-to-peer network users and (b) network utilization, a global property that is of interest to network service providers. We propose a class of overlay topologies and show, by simulation, that a particular topology instance of this class where every node has many close neighbors and few random neighbors (i.e., a small-world graph) exhibits very good properties. In this overlay topology, the chances of locating files are high, and the nodes where these files are found are, on average, close to the query source. This improvement in search protocol performance is achieved while decreasing the traffic load on the links in the underlying network. We propose a simple greedy algorithm to construct such overlay topologies where each node operates independently and in a decentralized manner to select its neighbors.

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Shashidhar Merugu received the B. Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science. His research examines the interplay between routing messages and network topology design in two classes of networks - unstructured peer-to-peer networks and sparsely-connected ad hoc networks. His current research interests include

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    Shashidhar Merugu received the B. Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science. His research examines the interplay between routing messages and network topology design in two classes of networks - unstructured peer-to-peer networks and sparsely-connected ad hoc networks. His current research interests include applications and algorithms for peer-to-peer networks, overlay networks and environments for mobile and ubiquitous computing. In the past, he has worked on active networks, packet classifiers and real-time systems.

    Sridhar Srinivasan received the B.E. degree in Computer Engg. from the Delhi Institute of Technology, India, and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from the Iowa State University. He is currently a graduate student in the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests lie in peer-to-peer networks, overlay multicast and network measurements.

    Ellen Zegura received the B.S. degree in Computer Science (1987), the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (1987), the M.S. degree in Computer Science (1990) and the D.Sc. in Computer Science (1993) all from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Since 1993, she has been on the faculty in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The theme of her research work is the development of wide-area (Internet) networking services. Most of her work in this area falls into three categories: (1) measurement and modeling, (2) design of new services, and (3) investigation of paradigms and platforms to support new services.

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