We investigate in this paper the performance of a simple file sharing principle. For this purpose, we consider a system composed of N peers becoming active at exponential random times; the system is initiated with only one server offering the desired file and the other peers after becoming active try to download it. Once the file has been downloaded by a peer, this one immediately becomes a server. To investigate the transient behavior of this file sharing system, we study the instant when the system shifts from a congested state where all servers available are saturated by incoming demands to a state where a growing number of servers are idle. In spite of its apparent simplicity, this queueing model (with a random number of servers) turns out to be quite difficult to analyze. A formulation in terms of an urn and ball model is proposed and corresponding scaling results are derived. These asymptotic results are then compared against simulations.
Peer-to-peer file sharing envisions a data-centric dissemination model, where files consisting of multiple data pieces can be shared from any peer that can offer the data or from multiple peers simultaneously. This aim, implemented at the application layer of the network architecture, matches with the objective of Named Data Networking (NDN), a proposed Internet architecture that features a data-centric communication model at the network layer. To study the impact of a data-centric network architecture on peer-to-peer file sharing, we proposed nTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing application …
This paper introduces DAta-centric Peer-to-peer filE Sharing (DAPES), a data sharing protocol for scenarios with intermittent connectivity and user mobility. DAPES provides a set of semantically meaningful hierarchical naming abstractions that facilitate the exchange of file collections via local connectivity. This enables peers to "make the most" out of the limited connection time with other peers by maximizing the utility of individual transmissions to provide data missing by most connected peers. DAPES runs on top of Named-Data Networking (NDN) and extends NDN's data-centric network layer a…
File sharing, typically involving video or audio material in which copyright may persist and using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks like BitTorrent, has been reported to make up the bulk of Internet traffic. The free-riding problem appears in this "digital gift economy" but its users exhibit rational behaviour, subject to the characteristics of the particular network. The high demand for the Internet as a delivery channel for entertainment underlines the importance of understanding the dynamics of this market, especially when considering possible business models for future pricing or licensing regi…
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have proved to be the most effective and popular file sharing applications in recent years. Previous studies mainly focus on the equal service and the differentiated service strategies when peers have no initial data before their download. In an upload-constrained P2P file sharing system, we model both the equal service process and the differentiated service process when peers' initial data distribution satisfies some special conditions, and also show how to minimize the time to get the file to any number of peers. The proposed models can reveal the intrinsic relatio…
File-sharing networks are distributed systems used to disseminate files among nodes of a communication network. The general simple principle of these systems is that once a node has retrieved a file, it may become a server for this file. In this paper, the capacity of these networks is analyzed with a stochastic model when there is a constant flow of incoming requests for a given file. It is shown that the problem can be solved by analyzing the asymptotic behavior of a class of interacting branching processes. Several results of independent interest concerning these branching processes are der…
Consumers of short videos on Internet can have a bad Quality of Experience QoE due to the long distance between the consumers and the servers that hosting the videos. We propose an optimization of the file allocation in telecommunication operators content sharing servers to improve the QoE through files duplication, thus bringing the files closer to the consumers. This optimization allows the network operator to set the level of QoE and to have control over the users access cost by setting a number of parameters. Two optimization methods are given and are followed by a comparison of their effi…
Ransomware is considered as a significant threat for most enterprises since the past few years. In scenarios wherein users can access all files on a shared server, one infected host can lock the access to all shared files. We propose a tool to detect ransomware infection based on file-sharing traffic analysis. The tool monitors the traffic exchanged between the clients and the file servers and using machine learning techniques it searches for patterns in the traffic that betray ransomware actions while reading and overwriting files. The proposal is designed to work for clear text and for encry…
There is a great interest in many approaches towards blockchain in providing a solution to record transactions in a decentralized way. However, there are some limitations when storing large files or documents on the blockchain. In order to meet the requirements of storing relatively large data, a decentralized storage medium is produced. IPFS is a distributed file system which is content-addressable. It works very similar to the blockchain network. There are some attempts which take advantage of the blockchain concept and IPFS to design new approaches. Unfortunately, there are some inefficienc…
BitTorrent is undoubtedly the most popular P2P file sharing application on today's Internet. The widespread popularity of BitTorrent has attracted a great deal of attention from networking researchers who conducted various performance studies on it. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of analytical performance modeling techniques for BitTorrent networks. The performance models examined in this study include deterministic models, Markov chain models, fluid flow models, and queuing network models. These models evaluate the performance metrics of BitTorrent networks at different regimes wi…
We study the interaction between network effects and external incentives on file sharing behavior in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Many current or envisioned P2P networks reward individuals for sharing files, via financial incentives or social recognition. Peers weigh this reward against the cost of sharing incurred when others download the shared file. As a result, if other nearby nodes share files as well, the cost to an individual node decreases. Such positive network sharing effects can be expected to increase the rate of peers who share files. In this paper, we formulate a natural model fo…
Web caches, content distribution networks, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, distributed file systems, and data grids all have in common that they involve a community of users who generate requests for shared data. In each case, overall system performance can be improved significantly if we can first identify and then exploit interesting structure within a community's access patterns. To this end, we propose a novel perspective on file sharing based on the study of the relationships that form among users based on the files in which they are interested. We propose a new structure that capture…
We propose a new model for peer-to-peer networking which takes the network bottlenecks into account beyond the access. This model allows one to cope with key features of P2P networking like degree or locality constraints or the fact that distant peers often have a smaller rate than nearby peers. We show that the spatial point process describing peers in their steady state then exhibits an interesting repulsion phenomenon. We analyze two asymptotic regimes of the peer-to-peer network: the fluid regime and the hard--core regime. We get closed form expressions for the mean (and in some cases the …
Solving free riding and selecting a reliable service provider in P2P networks has been separately investigated in last few years. Using trust has shown to be one of the best ways of solving these problems. But using this approach to simultaneously deal with both problems makes it impossible for newcomers to join the network and the expansion of network is prevented. In this paper we used the game theory to model the behavior of peers and developed a mechanism in which free riding and providing bad service are dominated strategies for peers. At the same time newcomers can participate and are en…
BitTorrent is a popular communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing. It uses a data-centric approach, wherein the data is decentralized and peers request each other for pieces of the file(s). Aspects of this process is similar to the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, but is realized completely at the application level on top of TCP/IP networking. nTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing application that is based on NDN. The goal of this project is to port the application onto ndnSIM to allow for simulation and testing.
A peer-to-peer system is a distributed system in which equal nodes (in terms of role and usage) exchange information and services directly. This paper describes a distributed peer-to-peer protocol that allows wifi-enabled smart devices (especially Android smartphones) to exchange data using only wifi. The protocol is designed to allow the automatic establishment of a distributed peer-to-peer network of any size without geography constraint. It is applied to file sharing between devices, but can easily be adapted to support any data sharing. The protocol defines two layers: (1) a kernel layer r…
BitTorrent is a popular communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing. It uses a data-centric approach, wherein the data is decentralized and peers request each other for pieces of the file(s). Aspects of this process is similar to the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, but is realized completely at the application level on top of TCP/IP networking. nTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing application that is based on NDN. The goal of this project is to port the application onto ndnSIM and illustrate the effects of routing and forwarding.
Monitoring network state can be crucial in Future Internet infrastructures. Passive monitoring of all the routers is expensive and prohibitive. Storing, accessing and sharing the data is a technological challenge among networks with conflicting economic interests. Active monitoring methods can be attractive alternatives as they are free from most of these issues. Here we demonstrate that it is possible to improve the active network tomography methodology to such extent that the quality of the extracted link or router level delay is comparable to the passively measurable information. We show th…
The number of active users of Wi-Fi Direct Device-to-Device file sharing applications on Android has exceeded 1.8 billion. Wi-Fi Direct, also known as Wi-Fi P2P, is commonly used for peer-to-peer, high-speed file transfer between mobile devices, as well as a close proximity connection mode for wireless cameras, network printers, TVs and other IoT and mobile devices. For its end users, such type of direct file transfer does not incur cellular data charges. However, despite the popularity of such applications, we observe that the software vendors tend to prioritize the ease of user flow over the…
In this paper, we study the problem of reducing the delay of downloading data from cloud storage systems by leveraging multiple parallel threads, assuming that the data has been encoded and stored in the clouds using fixed rate forward error correction (FEC) codes with parameters (n, k). That is, each file is divided into k equal-sized chunks, which are then expanded into n chunks such that any k chunks out of the n are sufficient to successfully restore the original file. The model can be depicted as a multiple-server queue with arrivals of data retrieving requests and a server corresponding …
The distribution of files using decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, has significant advantages over centralized approaches. It is however more difficult to settle on the best approach for file sharing. Most file sharing systems are based on query string searches, leading to a relatively simple but inefficient broadcast or to an efficient but relatively complicated index in a structured environment. In this paper we use a browsable peer-to-peer file index consisting of files which serve as directory nodes, interconnecting to form a directory network. We implemented the system based on Bi…
In wireless access network optimization, today's main challenges reside in traffic offload and in the improvement of both capacity and coverage networks. The operators are interested in solving their localized coverage and capacity problems in areas where the macro network signal is not able to serve the demand for mobile data. Thus, the major issue for operators is to find the best solution at reasonable expanses. The femto cell seems to be the answer to this problematic. In this work (This work is supported by the COMET project AWARE. http://www.ftw.at/news/project-start-for-aware-ftw), we f…
Kademlia is a decentralized overlay network, up to now mainly used for highly scalable file sharing applications. Due to its distributed nature, it is free from single points of failure. Communication can happen over redundant network paths, which makes information distribution with Kademlia resilient against failing nodes and attacks. This makes it applicable to more scenarios than Internet file sharing. In this paper, we simulate Kademlia networks with varying parameters and analyze the number of node-disjoint paths in the network, and thereby the network connectivity. A high network connect…
File-sharing systems, like many online and traditional information sharing communities (e.g. newsgroups, BBS, forums, interest clubs), are dynamical systems in nature. As peers get in and out of the system, the information content made available by the prevailing membership varies continually in amount as well as composition, which in turn affects all peers' join/leave decisions. As a result, the dynamics of membership and information content are strongly coupled, suggesting interesting issues about growth, sustenance and stability. In this paper, we propose to study such communities with a si…
In peer-to-peer file sharing network, it is hard to distinguish between a legitimate newcomer and a whitewasher. This makes whitewashing a big problem in peer-to-peer networks. Although the problem of whitewashing can be solved using permanent identities, it may take away the right of anonymity for users. In this paper, we a have proposed a novel algorithm to avoid this problem when network uses free temporary identities. In this algorithm, the initial reputation is adjusted according to the level of whitewashing in the network.
This paper presents a solution for reducing the ill effects of free-riders in decentralised unstructured P2P networks. An autonomous replication scheme is proposed to improve the availability and enhance system performance. Q-learning is widely employed in different situations to improve the accuracy in decision making by each peer. Based on the performance of neighbours of a peer, every neighbour is awarded different levels of ranks. At the same time a low-performing node is allowed to improve its rank in different ways. Simulation results show that Q-learning based free riding control mechan…
Thanks to the great progress in mobile and wireless technologies, Internet-distributed applications like P2P file sharing are nowadays deployed over MANET (i.e., P2P mobile systems). These applications allow users to search and share diverse multimedia resources over MANET. Due the nature of MANET, P2P mobile systems brought up many new thriving challenges regarding the query routing issue. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel context-aware query routing protocol for unstructured P2P mobile file sharing systems. Our protocol (i) locates relevant peers sharing pertinent resources for us…
With the success of P2P file sharing, new emerging P2P applications arise on the Internet for streaming content like voice (VoIP) or live video (IPTV). Nowadays, there are lots of works measuring P2P file sharing or P2P telephony systems, but there is still no comprehensive study about P2P IPTV, whereas it should be massively used in the future. During the last FIFA world cup, we measured network traffic generated by P2P IPTV applications like PPlive, PPstream, TVants and Sopcast. In this paper we analyze some of our results during the same games for the applications. We focus on traffic stati…
Most peer-to-peer content distribution systems require the peers to privilege the welfare of the overall system over greedily maximizing their own utility. When downloading a file broken up into multiple pieces, peers are often asked to pass on some possible download opportunities of common pieces in order to favor rare pieces. This is to avoid the missing piece syndrome, which throttles the download rate of the peer-to-peer system to that of downloading the file straight from the server. In other situations, peers are asked to stay in the system even though they have collected all the file's …
Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks such as BitTorrent and Avalanche are increasingly used for disseminating potentially large files from a server to many end users via the Internet. The key idea is to divide the file into many equally-sized parts and then let users download each part (or, for network coding based systems such as Avalanche, linear combinations of the parts) either from the server or from another user who has already downloaded it. However, their performance evaluation has typically been limited to comparing one system relative to another and typically been realized by means of…
