Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is one of the most commonly used methods for sharing files over a network, especially large files such as videos or music recordings. In North America, P2P file-sharing networks occupied approximately 50% of the network traffic in 2011 [3]. Many files shared through P2P networks are related to Internet piracy or unintentional file sharing. Foxy P2P network, a typical search-based P2P network, is in the spotlight for sensitive file sharing. Peers download the files by using keywords instead of resource links. Therefore, the investigation mechanisms developed to identify the first seeder in Bit-Torrent network – another type of P2P network [54], cannot be applied to this scenario. Identifying the first seeder is the critical step in P2P investigation. The investigator cannot collect necessary evidence without locating the first seeder. Therefore, conducting forensic analysis is impossible. Moreover, validating the actual first seeder will be challenging when more than one uploader is identified. This study started by analyzing different P2P networks and comparing their underlying features. Categorizing the P2P file-sharing networks resulted in the identification of the key functions for file sharing. Two difficulties in Foxy network investigation, namely, unknown file publication time and uncertainty of network coverage by uploaders and downloaders, were also highlighted. To further examine the Foxy P2P network, a controlled testing environment for the P2P network was developed in a network simulation environment (i.e., NS-3). Tests were conducted in the simulation environment, and the effects of various attributes (file size, file transfer rate, file popularity) on the growth of the number of uploaders (represented by the seeder curve) were analyzed. Results demonstrated that the shape of the seeder curve was affected by the file propagation feature of the file-sharing activity. The slow-rising period, which represented the competition for the file content being shared among peers, was recorded at the initial stage of file sharing in the P2P network. Competition for file content is one of the key factors related to the success or failure in performing P2P investigation through the simulation environment. An investigation algorithm and four validation rules were proposed based on the above key factor to perform P2P investigation. Through controlled and randomly selected experiments, the investigation could be applied to the search-based P2P file-sharing environment as long as the required slow-rising period in other P2P networks was followed [68]. Analysis of the experimental results demonstrated the ability of the proposed investigation model and the validation rules. The results verified and confirmed the observed seeder in the P2P file-sharing scenario if competitions among downloaders for the shared file content existed. The limitations of the P2P investigation and validation model were also discussed. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have achieved outstanding success during the past decades and much efforts has been put into investigating incentive mechanisms for strategic P2P networks. In the numerous studies of P2P system, efficient resource utilization has always been a critical factor in designing incentive schemes. Most existing studies try to encourage strategic peers to contribute more to the system, in order to maximize the resources. However, without considering how to effectively measure contributions and without adopting well-designed trading policies, simply motivating more contributions could lead to outcomes that do not match the original intention. This thesis, therefore, focuses on the investigation of efficient resource utilization in strategic P2P systems. First, it is found that increased contributions in terms of upload rate does not necessarily lead to better system performance. Observing that different chunks have different values to both the system and individual peers, a value-based metric is devised to measure contributions instead of using rate-based metrics. A variation of BitTorrent is also proposed, called value-based BitTorrent (VBT). VBT is found to effectively punish the strategic behaviors of an underreporting chunk map, and there is a positive correlation between investment and return for cooperative peers in VBT networks. Moreover, VBT always outperforms BitTorrent in terms of system performance. Second, taking the chunk value in the reciprocity process into consideration, the overpayment problem in a BitTorrent network is investigated, and four side effects of overpayment are identified. A new scheme is proposed to visualize overpayment and a series of metrics is proposed based on this method to quantify overpayment. The proposed value-based approach is found to be able to alleviate the degree of overpayment and consequently relieve the side effects of overpayment. Third, the performance of popular protocols in a P2P file-sharing system is investigated from the perspective of overpayment. These protocols are studied in two directions, when the measurement metrics are varied and when trading policy becomes tighter. The correlations between fairness, performance, and robustness are also examined. Finally, because overpayment is a fundamental problem of improper price setting, and auction is a widely used and effective method in setting prices in distributed systems. Auction is analytically proved that it is able to lead to optimal price without overpayment. However, most existing auction schemes are based on credit, which could induce a huge overhead in maintaining a monetary system, and monetary systems also have many inherent problems, such as inflation. The efficacy of applying an auction-like approach in P2P systems without money is investigated. A simplified version of the barter-based auction-like approach is tested in P2P file sharing and its overpayment degree is evaluated. Moreover, a novel barter-based auction-like approach is proposed for a P2P streaming system, and it is found that it can successfully punish strategic behaviors, with overall system performance outperforming a tit-for-tat strategy. / published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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A peer-to-peer (P2P) system is a networked system characterized by the lack of centralized control, in which all or most communication is symmetric. Also, a P2P system is supposed to handle frequent arrivals and departures of nodes, and is expected to scale to very large network sizes. These requirements make the design of P2P systems particularly challenging. We investigate two central issues pertaining to the design of P2P systems: load balancing and routing. In the first part of this thesis, we study the problem of load balancing in the context of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). Briefly, a DHT is a giant hash table that is maintained in a P2P fashion: Keys are mapped to a hash space I --- typically the interval [0,1), which is partitioned into blocks among the nodes, and each node stores the keys that are mapped to its block. Based on the position of their blocks in I, the nodes also set up connections among themselves, forming a routing network, which facilitates efficient key location. Typically, in a DHT it is desirable that the nodes' blocks are roughly of equal size, since this usually implies a balanced distribution of the load of storing keys among nodes, and it also simplifies the design of the routing network. We propose and analyze a simple distributed scheme for partitioning I, inspired by the multiple random choices paradigm. This scheme guarantees that, with high probability, the ratio between the largest and smallest blocks remains bounded by a small constant. It is also message efficient, and the arrival or departure of a node perturbs the current partition of I minimally. A unique feature of this scheme is that it tolerates adversarial arrivals and departures of nodes. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the complexity of a natural decentralized routing protocol, in a broad family of randomized networks. The network family and routing protocol in question are inspired by a framework proposed by Kleinberg to model small-world phenomena in social networks, and they capture many designs that have been proposed for P2P systems. For this model we establish a general lower bound on the expected message complexity of routing, in terms of the average node degree. This lower bound almost matches the corresponding known upper bound.

The past decade has witnessed tremendous growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming applications on the Internet. For these applications, playback smoothness and timeliness are the two most important aspects of users' viewing experiences, whereas the amount of traffic is Internet service providers' main concern. According to the playback delay, video streaming can be classified into on-demand streaming, live streaming, and interactive streaming. P2P live streaming applications typically have an arbitrary number of users, tens of seconds of playback delay, and a high packet delivery rate, but their heavy traffic incurs great financial expenditure and threatens the quality of other services. Interactive streaming applications usually have a small group size, several hundreds of milliseconds of playback delay, and reasonable traffic volume, but cannot achieve a high packet delivery rate. The goal of this thesis is to study traffic locality and reliable delivery of packets in large-scale live streaming and small-scale interactive streaming applications, while keeping the playback delay well below the targeted applications' limits. For P2P live streaming applications, we first identify "typical" schemes from existing P2P live streaming schemes, investigate packet propagation behavior and the impact of neighboring strategies on system performance, and then propose innovative schemes that take both users' viewing experience and traffic locality into consideration. We show that the network-driven tree-based schemes with the swarming technique as a re-transmission error-correction mechanism are superior to the data-driven swarm-based or tree-based schemes, and a properly designed tree-based scheme can localize the traffic while maintaining a high packet delivery rate. For interactive streaming applications, we analyze the efficacy of systematic forward error-correction (FEC) codes against the bursty errors of Internet links when using peers to provide multiple one-hop paths between two communication parties. We find that although using peers for path diversity often results in a lower post-FEC packet loss ratio, some conditions do apply. The interplay of a number of factors, such as the Internet links' error ratio and burst length and the coding parameters, determines the performance of FEC. We provide guidelines and computation methods to determine whether the use of peers for path diversity can be justified. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-26 15:20:35.555

The use of parallel computing is increasing with the need to solve ever more complex problems. Unfortunately, while the cost of parallel systems (including clusters and small-scale shared memory machines) has decreased, such machines are still not within the reach of many users. This is particularly true if large numbers of processors are needed. A largely untapped resource for doing some, simpler, types of parallel computing are temporarily idle machines in distributed environments. Such environments range from the simple (identical machines connected via a LAN) to the complex (heterogeneous machines connected via the Internet). In this thesis I describe a system for dynamically clustering together similar machines distributed across the Internet. This is done in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion with the goal of ultimately forming useful compute clusters without the need for a heavily centralized software system overseeing the process. In this sense my work builds on so-called "volunteer computing" efforts, such as SETI@Home but with the goal of supporting a #11;different class of compute problems. I #12;first consider the characteristics that are necessary to form good clusters of shared machines that can be used together effectively. Second, I exploit simple clustering algorithms to group together appropriate machines using the identified#12;ed characteristics. My system assembles workstations into clusters which are, in some sense, "close" in terms of bandwidth, latency and/or number of network hops and that are also computationally similar in terms of processor speed, memory capacity and available hard disk space. Finally, I assess the conditions under which my proposed system might be effective via simulation using generated network topologies that are intended to reflect real-world characteristics. The results of these simulations suggest that my system is tunable to different conditions and that the algorithms presented can #11;effectively group together appropriate machines to form clusters and can also manage those clusters #11;effectively as the constituent machines join and leave the system.

A peer-to-peer (P2P) system is a networked system characterized by the lack of centralized control, in which all or most communication is symmetric. Also, a P2P system is supposed to handle frequent arrivals and departures of nodes, and is expected to scale to very large network sizes. These requirements make the design of P2P systems particularly challenging. We investigate two central issues pertaining to the design of P2P systems: load balancing and routing. In the first part of this thesis, we study the problem of load balancing in the context of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). Briefly, a DHT is a giant hash table that is maintained in a P2P fashion: Keys are mapped to a hash space I --- typically the interval [0,1), which is partitioned into blocks among the nodes, and each node stores the keys that are mapped to its block. Based on the position of their blocks in I, the nodes also set up connections among themselves, forming a routing network, which facilitates efficient key location. Typically, in a DHT it is desirable that the nodes' blocks are roughly of equal size, since this usually implies a balanced distribution of the load of storing keys among nodes, and it also simplifies the design of the routing network. We propose and analyze a simple distributed scheme for partitioning I, inspired by the multiple random choices paradigm. This scheme guarantees that, with high probability, the ratio between the largest and smallest blocks remains bounded by a small constant. It is also message efficient, and the arrival or departure of a node perturbs the current partition of I minimally. A unique feature of this scheme is that it tolerates adversarial arrivals and departures of nodes. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the complexity of a natural decentralized routing protocol, in a broad family of randomized networks. The network family and routing protocol in question are inspired by a framework proposed by Kleinberg to model small-world phenomena in social networks, and they capture many designs that have been proposed for P2P systems. For this model we establish a general lower bound on the expected message complexity of routing, in terms of the average node degree. This lower bound almost matches the corresponding known upper bound.

The use of parallel computing is increasing with the need to solve ever more complex problems. Unfortunately, while the cost of parallel systems (including clusters and small-scale shared memory machines) has decreased, such machines are still not within the reach of many users. This is particularly true if large numbers of processors are needed. A largely untapped resource for doing some, simpler, types of parallel computing are temporarily idle machines in distributed environments. Such environments range from the simple (identical machines connected via a LAN) to the complex (heterogeneous machines connected via the Internet). In this thesis I describe a system for dynamically clustering together similar machines distributed across the Internet. This is done in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion with the goal of ultimately forming useful compute clusters without the need for a heavily centralized software system overseeing the process. In this sense my work builds on so-called "volunteer computing" efforts, such as SETI@Home but with the goal of supporting a #11;different class of compute problems. I #12;first consider the characteristics that are necessary to form good clusters of shared machines that can be used together effectively. Second, I exploit simple clustering algorithms to group together appropriate machines using the identified#12;ed characteristics. My system assembles workstations into clusters which are, in some sense, "close" in terms of bandwidth, latency and/or number of network hops and that are also computationally similar in terms of processor speed, memory capacity and available hard disk space. Finally, I assess the conditions under which my proposed system might be effective via simulation using generated network topologies that are intended to reflect real-world characteristics. The results of these simulations suggest that my system is tunable to different conditions and that the algorithms presented can #11;effectively group together appropriate machines to form clusters and can also manage those clusters #11;effectively as the constituent machines join and leave the system.

Video streaming over the Internet can be very difficult under the traditional client-server model. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, in which each participating peer contributes its upload bandwidth to other peers while it downloads data, have been successful in file-sharing applications, and they appear to be promising in delivering video contents, too. However, the existence of network address translation (NAT) is always considered as a challenge to peer-to-peer systems. NAT has been a practical solution to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address exhaustion problem, as it reduces the usage of IP addresses by allowing multiple private hosts to share a single public IP address, but NAT can degrade the performance of a peer-to-peer system as it limits the direction of connectivity. Measurement studies show that a considerable fraction of peer-to-peer video streaming system users are behind NAT devices, and that their uplink bandwidth is not well utilized, but the literature lacks a quantitative analysis of the impact of NAT on the performance of P2P video streaming systems. In this thesis, an extensible analytical model is built to capture the performance for P2P live streaming systems with a certain percentage of users behind NAT and cannot be reached by NAT traversal techniques, the correctness of which is verified by software simulation. A simple mechanism is proposed in this thesis, which is able to effectively improve the system performance and fairness by counteracting the negative impact of NAT, and it can also be used to reduce the usage of server bandwidth. / Graduate