GnuViz – Mapping the Gnutella Network to its Geographical Locations

ABSTRACT

Gnutella is a classical Peer-to-Peer network designed for filesharing. The absence of pure servers is one of its main properties, given that every Gnutella host is client and host in one. It uses the resources of the participants to distribute content, e.g. mp3 compressed audio files, and shares the processing capacity to provide the routing and searching capabilities for the network.

In this work we present GnuViz, a tool to visualize the geographical context of the virtual overlay network established by the Gnutella Protocol. Therefore a Gnutella Network Crawler is used, so that real life measurements of the Gnutella Network can be performed. With the additional aid of a geographical database the acquired IP address of each logged participant can be assigned to its geographical coordinates. A Java based script finally displays the network structure on arbitrary world maps. By using GnuViz we are able to substantiate the shortcomings of Gnutella, and propose protocol modifications to improve the network behavior of Gnutella.