CharacterizationofP2PSystems.PDFVIP

Characterization of P2P Systems Daniel Stutzbach and Reza Rejaie 1 Introduction Understanding existing systems and devising new P2P techniques relies on having access to representative models derived from empirical observations of existing sys- tems. However, the large and dynamic nature of P2P systems makes capturing accu- rate measurements challenging. Because there is no central repository, data must be gathered from the peers who appear and depart as users start and exit the P2P appli- cation. Even a simple task such as counting the number of peers can be challenging since each peer can only report its immediate overlay neighbors. The first half of this chapter surveys techniques for measuring attributes of P2P systems as well as characterizations derived from the application of those techniques. The second half explores two measurement techniques in detail— crawling and sampling—and demonstrates the importance of validating measure- ment methodology. Systematically tackling the problem of characterizing P2P systems requires a structured organization of the different components. At the most basic level, a P2P system consists of a set of connected peers. We can view this as a graph with the peers as vertices and the connections as edges. One fundamental way to divide the problem space is into properties of the peers versus properties of the way peers are connected. Another fundamental division is examining the way the system is versus the way the system evolves. In some sense, any property may change with time and could be viewed as system evolution. We use the term “static properties” to refer to properties that can be measured at a particular moment in time and modeled with a static model (e.g., peer degree), and the term “dynamic properties” to refer to proper- ties that are fundamentally dynamic in nature (e.g., session length). Table 1 presents Daniel Stutzbach Stutzbach Enterprises, Dallas