An Introduction to
Peer-to-Peer System
Diganta Goswami
IIT Guwahati
Outline
Overview of P2P overlay networks
 Applications of overlay networks
 Classification of overlay networks


Structured overlay networks
 Unstructured overlay networks
 Overlay multicast networks
2
Overview of P2P overlay networks

What is P2P systems?


P2P refers to applications that take advantage of
resources (storage, cycles, content, …) available at the
end systems of the internet.
What is overlay networks?
 Overlay
networks refer to networks that are constructed
on top of another network (e.g. IP).

What is P2P overlay network?

Any overlay network that is constructed by the Internet
peers in the application layer on top of the IP network.
3
What is P2P systems?
Multiple sites (at edge)
 Distributed resources
 Sites are autonomous (different owners)
 Sites are both clients and servers
 Sites have equal functionality

4
Internet P2P Traffic Statistics

Between 50 and 65 percent of all download traffic is
P2P related.
Between 75 and 90 percent of all upload traffic is P2P
related.
And it seems that more people are using p2p today

So what do people download?




61.4 % video
11.3 % audio
27.2 % games/software/etc.
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/peer-to-peer-trafficstatistics/
5
P2P overlay networks properties
Efficient use of resources
 Self-organizing
 All peers organize themselves into an application
layer network on top of IP.
 Scalability
 Consumers of resources also donate resources
 Aggregate resources grow naturally with
utilization

6
P2P overlay networks properties
 Reliability
No single point of failure
 Redundant overlay links between the peers
 Redundant data source
 Ease of deployment and administration
 The nodes are self-organized
 No need to deploy servers to satisfy demand.
 Built-in fault tolerance, replication, and load
balancing
 No need any change in underlay IP networks

7
P2P Applications

P2P File Sharing
 Napster,
Gnutella, Kazaa, eDonkey,
BitTorrent
 Chord, CAN, Pastry/Tapestry, Kademlia

P2P Communications
 Skype,

Social Networking Apps
P2P Distributed Computing
 Seti@home
8
Popular file sharing P2P Systems
Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, Freenet
 Large scale sharing of files.

 User
A makes files (music, video, etc.) on
their computer available to others
 User B connects to the network, searches for
files and downloads files directly from user A

Issues of copyright infringement
9
P2P/Grid Distributed Processing

seti@home
 Search for ET intelligence
 Central site collects radio telescope data
 Data is divided into work chunks of 300 Kbytes
 User obtains client, which runs in background
 Peer
sets up TCP connection to central computer,
downloads chunk
 Peer does FFT on chunk, uploads results, gets
new chunk

Not P2P communication, but exploit Peer
computing power
10
Key Issues

Management
 How
to maintain the P2P system under high rate of
churn efficiently
 Application reliability is difficult to guarantee

Lookup
 How
to find out the appropriate content/resource that
a user wants

Throughput
 Content
distribution/dissemination applications
 How to copy content fast, efficiently, reliably
11
Management Issue

A P2P network must be self-organizing.




Join and leave operations must be self-managed.
The infrastructure is untrusted and the components are
unreliable.
The number of faulty nodes grows linearly with system size.
Tolerance to failures and churn




Content replication, multiple paths
Leverage knowledge of executing application
Load balancing
Dealing with free riders

Freerider : rational or selfish users who consume more than
their fair share of a public resource, or shoulder less than a
fair share of the costs of its production.
12
Lookup Issue


How do you locate data/files/objects in a large
P2P system built around a dynamic set of nodes
in a scalable manner without any centralized
server or hierarchy?
Efficient routing even if the structure of the
network is unpredictable.
 Unstructured
P2P : Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa
 Structured P2P : Chord, CAN, Pastry/Tapestry,
Kademlia
13
Classification of overlay networks

Structured overlay networks



Unstructured overlay networks


Are based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHT)
the overlay network assigns keys to data items and
organizes its peers into a graph that maps each data
key to a peer.
The overlay networks organize peers in a random
graph in flat or hierarchical manners.
Overlay multicast networks

The peers organize themselves into an overlay tree
for multicasting.
14
Structured overlay networks

Overlay topology construction is based on NodeID’s that
are generated by using Distributed Hash Tables (DHT).

The overlay network assigns keys to data items and
organizes its peers into a graph that maps each data key
to a peer.

This structured graph enables efficient discovery of data
items using the given keys.

It Guarantees object detection in O(log n) hops.
15
Unstructured P2P overlay networks

An Unstructured system composed of peers
joining the network with some loose rules,
without any prior knowledge of the topology.

Network uses flooding or random walks as
the mechanism to send queries across the
overlay with a limited scope.
16
Unstructured P2P File Sharing Networks



Centralized Directory based P2P systems
Pure P2P systems
Hybrid P2P systems
17
Unstructured P2P File Sharing Networks

Centralized Directory based P2P systems
 All peers are connected to central entity
 Peers establish connections between each
other on demand to exchange user data (e.g.
mp3 compressed data)
 Central entity is necessary to provide the
service
 Central entity is some kind of index/group
database
 Central entity is lookup/routing table
 Examples: Napster, Bittorent
18
Napster



was used primarily for file sharing
NOT a pure P2P network=> hybrid system
Ways of action:
 Client
sends server the query, server ask everyone
and responds to client
 Client gets list of clients from server
 All Clients send ID’s of the data they hold to the
server and when client asks for data, server responds
with specific addresses
 peer downloads directly from other peer(s)
19
Centralized Network

Napster model
Client
Client
Server
Reply
Query
• Nodes register their
contents with server
• Centralized server for
searches
• File access done on a
peer to peer basis
– Poor scalability
– Single point of failure
File Transfer
20
Napster

Further services:
 Chat
program, instant messaging service, tracking
program,…

Centralized system
 Single
point of failure => limited fault tolerance
 Limited scalability (server farms with load balancing)

Query is fast and upper bound for duration can
be given
21
Gnutella
pure peer-to-peer
 very simple protocol
 no routing "intelligence"
 Constrained broadcast

 Life-time
of packets limited by TTL (typically
set to 7)
 Packets have unique ids to detect loops
22
Query flooding: Gnutella

fully distributed
 no


central server
public domain
protocol
many Gnutella clients
implementing protocol
overlay network: graph
 edge between peer X and
Y if there’s a TCP
connection
 all active peers and
edges is overlay net
 Edge is not a physical
link
 Given peer will typically
be connected with < 10
overlay neighbors
23
Gnutella: protocol
r Query message
sent over existing TCP
connections
r peers forward
Query message
r QueryHit
sent over
reverse
Query
path
Scalability:
limited scope
flooding
File transfer:
HTTP
Query
QueryHit
QueryHit
24
Gnutella : Scenario
Step 0: Join the network
Step 1: Determining who is on the network
• "Ping" packet is used to announce your presence on the network.
• Other peers respond with a "Pong" packet.
• Also forwards your Ping to other connected peers
• A Pong packet also contains:
• an IP address
• port number
• amount of data that peer is sharing
• Pong packets come back via same route
Step 2: Searching
•Gnutella "Query" ask other peers (usually 7) if they have the file you desire
• A Query packet might ask, "Do you have any content that matches the string
‘Hey Jude"?
• Peers check to see if they have matches & respond (if they have any matches)
& send packet to connected peers if not (usually 7)
• Continues for TTL (how many hops a packet can go before it dies, typically 10 )
Step 3: Downloading
• Peers respond with a “QueryHit” (contains contact info)
• File transfers use direct connection using HTTP protocol’s GET method 25
Gnutella: Peer joining
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Joining peer X must find some other peer in
Gnutella network: use list of candidate peers
X sequentially attempts to make TCP with
peers on list until connection setup with Y
X sends Ping message to Y; Y forwards Ping
message.
All peers receiving Ping message respond with
Pong message
X receives many Pong messages. It can then
setup additional TCP connections
26
Gnutella - PING/PONG
3
6
Ping 1
Ping 1
Pong 3 Pong 6,7,8
Pong 6,7,8
Pong 6
Ping 1
1
Known Hosts:
2
3,4,5
Pong 3,4,5
Pong 5
2
Ping 1
5
Pong 7
Ping 1
Ping 1
Pong 2
Ping 1
Pong 4
7
Pong 8
8
6,7,8
4
Query/Response
analogous
27
Unstructured Blind - Gnutella
Breadth-First Search (BFS)
= source
= forward
query
= processe
query
= found
result
= forward
respons
28
Unstructured Blind - Gnutella


A node/peer connects to a set of Gnutella
neighbors
Forward queries to neighbors

Client which has the Information responds.

Flood network with TTL for termination
+ Results are complete
– Bandwidth wastage
29
Gnutella : Reachable Users
(analytical estimate)
T : TTL, N : Neighbors for Query
30
Gnutella : Search Issue

Flooding based search is extremely wasteful with
bandwidth




A large (linear) part of the network is covered irrespective of
hits found
Enormous number of redundant messages
All users do this in parallel: local load grows linearly with size
What can be done?

Controlling topology to allow for better search


Random walk, Degree-biased Random Walk
Controlling placement of objects

Replication
31
Gnutella : Random Walk

Basic strategy

In scale-free graph: high degree nodes are easy to find by (biased)
random walk



And high degree nodes can store the
index about a large portion of the network
Random walk


Scale-free graph is a graph whose degree distribution follows a power
law
avoiding the visit of last visited node
Degree-biased random walk



Select highest degree node, that has
not been visited
This first climbs to highest degree node,
then climbs down on the degree sequence
Provably optimal coverage
32
Gnutella : Replication

Spread copies of objects to peers: more
popular objects can be found easier

Replication strategies




Owner replication
Path replication
Random replication
But there is still the difficulty with rare objects.
33
Random Walkers

Improved Unstructured Blind
•Similar structure to
Gnutella
•Forward the query
(called walker) to
random subset of its
neighbors
+ Reduced bandwidth
requirements
– Incomplete results
Peer nodes
34
Unstructured Informed Networks

Zero in on target based on information about the query
and the neighbors.

Intelligent routing
+ Reduces number of messages
+ Not complete, but more accurate
– COST: Must thus flood in order to get initial information
35
Informed Searches: Local Indices

Node keeps track of information available within
a radius of r hops around it.

Queries are made to neighbors just beyond the r
radius.
+ Flooding limited to bounded part of network
36
Routing Indices

For each query, calculate goodness of each
neighbor.

Calculating goodness:
 Categorize
or separate query into themes
 Rank best neighbors for a given theme based on
number of matching documents

Follows chain of neighbors that are expected to
yield the best results

Backtracking possible
37
Free riding


File sharing networks rely on users sharing data
Two types of free riding
 Downloading
but not sharing any data
 Not sharing any interesting data

On Gnutella
 15%
of users contribute 94% of content
 63% of users never responded to a query

Didn’t have “interesting” data
38
Gnutella:summary








Hit rates are high
High fault tolerance
Adopts well and dynamically to changing peer
populations
High network traffic
No estimates on duration of queries
No probability for successful queries
Topology is unknown => algorithm cannot exploit it
Free riding is a problem



A significant portion of Gnutella peers are free riders
Free riders are distributed evenly across domains
Often hosts share files nobody is interested in
39
Gnutella discussion

Search types:


Scalability




High, since many paths are explored
Autonomy:



Search very poor with respect to number of messages
Updates excellent: nothing to do
Routing information: low cost
Robustness


Any possible string comparison
Storage: no restriction, peers store the keys of their files
Routing: peers are target of all kind of requests
Global knowledge

None required
40
Exploiting heterogeneity: KaZaA

Each peer is either a group
leader or assigned to a
group leader.



TCP connection between
peer and its group leader.
TCP connections between
some pairs of group leaders.
Group leader tracks the
content in all its children.
ordinary peer
group-leader peer
neighoring relationships
in overlay network
41
iMesh, Kazaa


Hybrid of centralized Napster and
decentralized Gnutella
Super-peers act as local search
hubs

Each super-peer is similar to a
Napster server for a small portion of
the network
 Super-peers are automatically
chosen by the system based on
their capacities (storage,
bandwidth, etc.) and availability
(connection time)



Users upload their list of files to a
super-peer
Super-peers periodically exchange
file lists
Queries are sent to a super-peer for
files of interest
42
Overlay Multicasting
 IP
multicast has not been deployed over the Internet
due to some fundamental problems in congestion
control, flow control, security, group management and
etc.
 For the new emerging applications such as
multimedia streaming, internet multicast service is
required.
 Solution: Overlay Multicasting

Overlay multicasting (or Application layer multicasting) is
increasingly being used to overcome the problem of nonubiquitous deployment of IP multicast across heterogeneous
networks.
43
Overlay Multicasting

Main idea

Internet peers organize themselves into an
overlay tree on top of the Internet.
 Packet replication and forwarding are
performed by peers in the application layer
by using IP unicast service.
44
Overlay Multicasting

Overlay multicasting benefits
 Easy deployment
 It is self-organized
 it is based on IP unicast service
 There is not any protocol support requirement by the Internet
routers.
 Scalability
 It is scalable with multicast groups and the number of
members in each group.
 Efficient resource usage
 Uplink resources of the Internet peers is used for multicast
data distribution.
 It is not necessary to use dedicated infrastructure and
bandwidths for massive data distribution in the Internet.
45
Overlay Multicasting

Overlay multicast approaches
 DHT
based
 Tree based
 Mesh-tree based
46
Overlay Multicasting

DHT based
 Overlay tree is constructed on top of the DHT based
P2P routing infrastructure such as pastry, CAN,
Chord, etc.
 Example: Scribe in which the overlay tree is
constructed on a Pastry networks by using a multicast
routing algorithm
47
Structured Overlay Networks / DHTs
Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, CAN,
Kademlia, P-Grid, Viceroy
Set of Nodes
Keys of Nodes
Common Identifier
Space
Connect
The nodes
Smartly
Keys of Values
…
Node Identifier
Value Identifier
48
The Principle Of Distributed Hash Tables

A dynamic distribution of a hash table onto a set of cooperating
nodes
Key
Value
1
Algorithms
9
Routing
11
DS
12
Peer-to-Peer
21
Networks
22
Grids
• Basic service: lookup operation
• Key resolution from any node
node A
node B
node D
node C
→Node D : lookup(9)
• Each node has a routing table
• Pointers to some other nodes
• Typically, a constant or a logarithmic number of pointers
49
DHT Desirable Properties
Keys mapped evenly to all nodes in the network
Each node maintains information about only a
few other nodes
Messages can be routed to a node efficiently
Node arrival/departures only affect a few nodes
50
Chord [MIT]
Problem adressed: efficient node
localization
 Distributed lookup protocol
 Simplicity, provable performance, proven
correctness
 Support of just one operation: given a key,
Chord maps the key onto a node

51
The Chord algorithm –
Construction of the Chord ring

the consistent hash function assigns each node
and each key an m-bit identifier using SHA 1
(Secure Hash Standard).
m = any number big enough to make collisions
improbable
Key identifier = SHA-1(key)
Node identifier = SHA-1(IP address)


Both are uniformly distributed
Both exist in the same ID space
52
Chord





consistent hashing (SHA-1) assigns each
node and object an m-bit ID
IDs are ordered in an ID circle ranging from
0 – (2m-1).
New nodes assume slots in ID circle
according to their ID
Key k is assigned to first node whose ID ≥ k
 successor(k)
53
Consistent Hashing - Successor Nodes
identifier
node
6
1
0
successor(6) = 0
6
identifier
circle
6
5
key
successor(1) = 1
1
7
X
2
2
successor(2) = 3
3
4
2
54
Consistent Hashing – Join and
Departure
When a node n joins the network, certain
keys previously assigned to n’s successor
now become assigned to n.
 When node n leaves the network, all of its
assigned keys are reassigned to n’s
successor.

55
Consistent Hashing – Node Join
keys
5
7
keys
1
0
1
7
keys
6
2
5
3
keys
2
4
56
Consistent Hashing – Node Dep.
keys
7
keys
1
0
1
7
keys
6
6
2
5
3
keys
2
4
57
Simple node localization
// ask node n to find the successor of id
n.find_successor(id)
if (id (n; successor])
return successor;
else
// forward the query around the
circle
return successor.find_successor(id);
=> Number of messages linear in
the number of nodes !
58
Scalable Key Location – Finger Tables

To accelerate lookups, Chord maintains additional routing
information.
This additional information is not essential for correctness,
which is achieved as long as each node knows its correct
successor.
Each node n, maintains a routing table with up to m
entries (which is in fact the number of bits in identifiers),
called finger table.
The ith entry in the table at node n contains the
identity of
i-1
the first node s that succeeds n by at least 2 on the
identifier circle.
s = successor(n+2i-1).

s is called the ith finger of node n, denoted by n.finger(i)




59