published_or_final_version / abstract / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

The Napster case has created a frenzy of controversy and confusion. The Peer to Peer technology developed by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, has forced the courts, the legislature, corporations, and individuals to reconsider the use of the Internet. Peer to peer networks create new challenges for the application of copyright law. However, these challenges are not that different from those which copyright law has evolved to accommodate in the past. Copyright law is intended to balance the interests of the creators and the public to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The premise behind copyright protection is to ensure that people continue creating, and that the public continues to enjoy those creations, through the mechanism of rewarding the creators with a temporary monopoly over their works. This balance of interests is fundamental to the interpretation of copyright law by the United States Congress and the Courts. This thesis focuses on the application and interpretation of copyright law through a case study of the law in the United States, in particular the Napster case. Although it now appears that the Internet can be subject to some form of regulation with the aid of technological innovation to enforce the regulation, the Courts in the Napster case have misinterpreted the previous judicial consideration attributed to copyright law. In essence, the fundamental principle of the balancing of interests has been lost. We are now left with an unequal balance in favor of large media conglomerates. It can be argued that the media conglomerates have used Napster as an example of their power to control the technology of peer to peer networking as a model of distribution. Napster demonstrates that peer to peer is an effective way of sharing information with an extremely large amount of people. This has the music industry scared, resulting in their legal battle to shut down the Napster technology. The claims of copyright misuse raise awareness of the need for regulation and a reassessment of copyright application in a digital age. There is a need for regulation. However, any attempts at further application of law and regulation to the Internet concerning copyright protection should consider the intent of the constitutional founders of the United States -- copyright law is intended to protect the interests of both the artists, and the public.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology. / Over the last few years Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have emerged as highly attractive systems supporting many useful large-scale applications and services. They allow the exploitation of enormous untapped resources (such as idle processing cycles, storage, and bandwidth) available at Internet-connected devices, which were previously considered incapable of providing services to others. Participating nodes (peers) form an overlay network and communicate with each other without being controlled by a central authority. The structures and routing decisions of the most current P2P networks often do not correlate with the Internet infrastructure. In doing so, the tasks of overlay construction and routing become less complicated however, this results in high end-to-end delay for the P2P applications. As a consequence, the P2P networks may not be able to provide stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for a new generation of P2P applications, and thus limit their benefits for the end users. Moreover, the infrastructure ignorance means P2P systems waste Internet resources by adding more than they should to the Internet traffic. This leads to the increase in Internet access costs substantially, and in turn the P2P systems do not scale well. The thesis presents a novel architecture for developing efficient P2P systems, and new schemes for constructing infrastructure-aware overlay networks. The main objective is first, to overcome the disparity between the overlay and Internet structures in order to maximize the use of network resources and reduce the overlay delay to the P2P applications; second, to provide efficient communication for P2P systems enabling deployment of any P2P applications while preserving decentralized, self-organizing and self-maintaining characteristics for the systems. To achieve these goals, we firstly developed Geographically Longest Prefix Matching (Geo-LPM) and Geographical Partitioning (Geo-Partitioning) schemes to cluster nodes that are close to each other in terms of network latency and network membership, and to determine links between neighboring clusters respectively. The developed schemes are efficient, generate low overhead, and help to produce excellent physically/infrastructure-aware overlay networks. Their distinctive features are self-organization, self-maintenance, and decentralization, which make them suitable to work in a P2P environment. Secondly we propose a novel architecture, called a physically-aware reference model (PARM) that captures desirable features for P2P systems by resolving major functional P2P system problems efficiently in a layered structure. For example, the application routing layer of PARM deals with routing inefficiency, meanwhile the infrastructure unawareness is resolved at the overlay network layer. We develop a useful P2P application, called a Peer Name Service (PNS) that interprets node names into their current IP addresses for any Internet-connected devices. Using the overlay networks, the PNS can support devices, which could be unreachable via the Domain Name Server (DNS), and mobile devices on-the-move without prior setup requirement in a distributed and timely fashion. Finally, to validate the whole concept of PARM, we simulate the PNS and a file transfer to a mobile node at the top layer of PARM, the P2P application layer. Since the PNS is sensitive to delay, it would be useful to evaluate the impacts of overlay delay factor and PARM on the performance of P2P applications. The simulation results show that the performance of the PARM-based applications is significantly improved while achieving decentralized and self-organizing features. The results also indicate that PARM can be a recommended reference model for developing scalable and efficient P2P systems.

With the extremely rapid development of the Internet in recent years, emerging peer-to-peer network overlays are meeting the requirements of a more sophisticated communications environment, providing a useful substrate for applications such as scalable file sharing, data storage, large-scale multicast, web-cache, and publish-subscribe services. Due to its design flexibility, peer-to-peer networks can offer features including self-organization, fault-tolerance, scalability, load-balancing, locality and anonymity. As the Internet grows, there is an urgent requirement to understand real-time network performance degradation. Measurement tools currently used are ping, traceroute and variations of these. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is also used by network administrators to monitor local networks. However, ping and traceroute can only be used temporarily, SNMP can only be deployed at certain points in networks and these tools are incapable of sharing network measurements among end-users. Due to the distributed nature of networking performance data, peer-to-peer overlay networks present an attractive platform to distribute this information among Internet users. This thesis aims at investigating the desirable locality property of peer-to-peer overlays to create an application to share Internet measurement performance. When measurement data are distributed amongst users, it needs to be localized in the network allowing users to retrieve it when external Internet links fail. Thus, network locality and robustness are the most desirable properties. Although some unstructured overlays also integrate locality in design, they fail to reach rarely located data items. Consequently, structured overlays are chosen because they can locate a rare data item deterministically and they can perform well during network failures. In structured peer-to-peer overlays, Tapestry, Pastry and Chord with proximity neighbour selection, were studied due to their explicit notion of locality. To differentiate the level of locality and resiliency in these protocols, P2Psim simulations were performed. The results show that Tapestry is the more suitable peer-to-peer substrate to build such an application due to its superior localizing data performance. Furthermore, due to the routing similarity between Tapestry and Pastry, an implementation that shares network measurement information was developed on freepastry, verifying the application feasibility. This project also contributes to the extension of P2Psim to integrate with GT-ITM and link failures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-208).

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Thesis (MA--Communication Studies) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2005. / Chapter 5 not included in e-thesis. Also held in print (viii, 177 leaves, 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection. (T 338.4778149 HIL)

Thesis (M. S. in Computer Science)--Vanderbilt University, May 2009. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 33-37). Also available in electronic version.