Peer-To-Peer

Peer-to-Peer: Monarchy in a decentralized system

This page aims at collecting and classifying information about peer-to-peer networks approaches.
I like Clay Shirky's two questions that define whether an application is or is Not "peer-to-peer" :

Does it treat variable connectivity and temporary network addresses as the norm ?
Does it give the nodes at the edges of the network significant autonomy ?

Topics:

Discovery
Messaging
MetaData/Interoperability
QoS/Security/Trust
Accountability
Social/Legal Impacts

And

Applications
General
Regarding 579 class

ECE 579 Peer-to-Peer class web page

Discovery: Location and Routing

A Discovery mechanism goal is to respond to a lookup request.
As opposed to central repositories (such as the current distribution of single voluminous books as the yellow pages) decentralized systems can be perceived as a yellow pages book (information) where sections from A-H, I-O and P-Z are distributed among some people (nodes); the question becomes how to find who know of 'Newton'?

Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, and Hari Balakrishnan. slides

Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems; Antony Rowstron and Peter Druschel

Tapestry: An Infrastructure for Fault-tolerant Wide-area Location and Routing; Ben Y. Zhao, John Kubiatowicz and Anthony D. Joseph; University of California, Berkeley

CAN A Scalable Content-Addressable Network; Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Scott Shenker slides

INS The design and implementation of an intentional naming system;William Adjie-Winoto, Elliot Schwartz, Hari Balakrishnan, and Jeremy Lilley; M.I.T

GRID A Scalable Location Service for Geographic Ad Hoc Routing; Jinyang Li, John Jannotti, Douglas S.J. De Couto, David R. Karger, Robert Morris; M.I.T

Alpine decentralized discovery in Large Peer Based Networks; A very interesting high-level review on the issue of Discovery and why the technologies that exist need to be replaced.

An Overview of Decentralized discovery mechanisms by Vincent Matossian
Chord: content location and routing system by Vincent Matossian

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Messaging: Defining the "Enveloppe-Header-Body-Footer"

Messaging is the part of a system that involves the communication of the requests,responses of any type.
Messages can be carried between two endpoints using either a direct point-to-point connection or a virtual channel made of an endpoint connection between the representative nodes to which the endpoints might be connected. This architecture supports point-to-point as well as notification-based messaging.
Messages can be of types:

Requests: carries the message to the object to be querried
Responses: Carry the result of the request
Notification: can be triggered from a remote endpoint through the use of a rule that fires a response when evaluated to true
Updates: persistent requests

Publisher/Subscriber and event notification prototypes

ELVIN

Gryphon

LeSubscribe

READY

Salamander

SIENA

Commercial Systems

Keryx
MQSeries
MQSonic
TIBCO/Rendezvous

Messaging in Peer-to-Peer networks by Steele Arbeeny
Messaging by Rangini Chowdhury

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Metadata

When describing what is contained in a message in a decoupled protocol-flexible environment, metadata is used to describe what is the data.
XML is a self-describing markup language that allows any information to be tagged with its definition.
Cataloging systems such as the Dewey decimal, the Library of Congress or the SuCode systems offer metadata to allow libraries to organize and structure their material.

Dewey Decimal Cartoon

Catalogs explanations

Links related to Dewey Decimal system

MetaData by Anand Vaidhyanathan
Metadata and the Resource Description Framework by Steele Arbeeny

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Security

Any transaction en route between endpoints might need a certain amount of security, whether it is minimal (simple bytestream) or optimal (using PKI and strong cyphers) is up to the degree of privacy/secrecy that the information exchanged might require.

P2P network security by P.J. Connolly security advisor; web Article

Security issues in p2p networks by Manish Agarwal

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Accountability

Given the recent popular lawsuits that peer-to-peer application writers are facing (see Napster, Morpheus etc...) still tocome systems will be built taking into account the need for policing and control of the material that is exchanged between the users.
Reputation and trust measurement is directly drawn from accountability of the system.

Paying Attention Clay Shirky's view on the business models raised by digital networks. Web Article

Working for free ?-Motivations of Participating in Open Source Projects Alexander Hars, Shaosong Ou. In proceedings of 34th HICSS Conference Maui 2001

Trust in peer-to-peer systems by Mandar Kelaskar
Accountabiliy in peer-to-peer democracy by Mandar Kelaskar

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Legal and Social issues

When copyrighted digital material traverses a network link, what is the legal implications regarding the application writer as well as the endpoint users ?

Peer-to-Peer O'Reilly Chapter 1 covers a brief history of p2p and some gives an overview of the issues of the design of the internet to come.

Timeline of Copyright in the U.S

EFF's legal case efforts overview of several legal cases in which the electronic frontier foundation is engaged

The Dmitri Sklyarov case

The Sony Betamax case

Code+Law

O'Reilly interviews legal thinker Lawrence Lessig

The End of Innovation ? Richard Koman interview Lawrence Lessig

IAAL: Peer-to-Peer file sharing and Copyright Law after Napster

From Copyright to Information Law-Implications of Digital Rights Management

Fair Use definition

Sklyarov news and more

Digital Rights Management Lanaguages

Links to XrML, DRML, ODRL ...

Presentation of P2P legal and social issues

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Applications

PAST: A large-scale, persistent peer-to-eer storage utility; Peter Druschel and Antony Rowstron

Adapting Publish/Subscribe Middleware to Achieve Gnutella-like Functionality; Dennis Heimbigner

SCRIBE: The design of a large-scale event notification infrastructure; Antony Rowstron, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Peter Druschel, and Miguel Castro

Bayeux: An Architecture for Scalable and Fault-tolerant Wide-area Data Dissemination; Shelley Q. Zhuang, Ben Y. Zhao, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, John D. Kubiatowicz;University of California, Berkeley