Large-scale Internet applications can benefit from an ability to predict round-trip times to other hosts without having to contact them first. Explicit measurements are often unattractive because the cost of measurement can outweigh the benefits of exploiting proximity information. Vivaldi is a simple, light-weight algorithm that assigns synthetic coordinates to hosts such that the distance between the coordinates of two hosts accurately predicts the communication latency between the hosts.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing accounts for an astonishing volume of current Internet tra#c. This paper probes deeply into modern P2P file sharing systems and the forces that drive them. By doing so, we seek to increase our understanding of P2P file sharing workloads and their implications for future multimedia workloads. Our research uses a three-tiered approach. First, we analyze a 200-day trace of over 20 terabytes of Kazaa P2P tra#c collected at the University of Washington. Second, we develop a model of multimedia workloads that lets us isolate, vary, and explore the impact of key system parameters. Our model, which we parameterize with statistics from our trace, lets us confirm various hypotheses about file-sharing behavior observed in the trace. Third, we explore the potential impact of localityawareness in Kazaa.

Attempts to generalize the Internet's point-to-point communication abstraction to provide services like multicast, anycast, and mobility have faced challenging technical problems and deployment barriers. To ease the deployment of such services, this paper proposes an overlay-based Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction. Instead of explicitly sending a packet to a destination, each packet is associated with an identifier; this identifier is then used by the receiver to obtain delivery of the packet. This level of indirection decouples the act of sending from the act of receiving, and allows i3 to efficiently support a wide variety of fundamental communication services. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we have designed and built a prototype based on the Chord lookup protocol.

Designing a wide-area distributed hash table (DHT) that provides high-throughput and low-latency network storage is a challenge. Existing systems have explored a range of solutions, including iterative routing, recursive routing, proximity routing and neighbor selection, erasure coding, replication, and server selection. This

Abstract — In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the iPlane, a scalable service providing accurate predictions of Internet path performance for emerging overlay services. Unlike the more common black box latency prediction techniques in use today, the iPlane builds an explanatory model of the Internet. We predict end-to-end performance by composing measured performance of segments of known Internet paths. This method allows us to accurately and efficiently predict latency, bandwidth, capacity and loss rates between arbitrary Internet hosts. We demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the iPlane service by applying it to several representative overlay services in use today: content distribution, swarming peer-to-peer filesharing, and voice-over-IP. In each case, we observe that using iPlane’s predictions leads to a significant improvement in end user performance. 1

The doubling constant of a metric space (X; d) is thesmallest value * such that every ball in X can be covered by * balls of half the radius. The doubling dimension of X isthen defined as dim(X) = log2 *. A metric (or sequence ofmetrics) is called doubling precisely when its doubling dimension is bounded. This is a robust class of metric spaceswhich contains many families of metrics that occur in applied settings.We give tight bounds for embedding doubling metrics into (low-dimensional) normed spaces. We consider bothgeneral doubling metrics, as well as more restricted families such as those arising from trees, from graphs excludinga fixed minor, and from snowflaked metrics. Our techniques include decomposition theorems for doubling metrics, andan analysis of a fractal in the plane due to Laakso [21]. Finally, we discuss some applications and point out a centralopen question regarding dimensionality reduction in L2.

Internet coordinate schemes have been proposed as a method for estimating minimum round trip time between hosts without direct measurement. In such a scheme, each host is assigned a set of coordinates, and Euclidean distance is used to form the desired estimate. Two key questions are: How accurate are coordinate schemes across the Internet as a whole? And: are coordinate assignment schemes fast enough, and scalable enough, for large scale use? In this paper we make contributions toward answering both those questions. Whereas the coordinate assignment problem has in the past been approached by nonlinear optimization, we develop a faster method based on dimensionality reduction of the Lipschitz embedding. We show that this method is reasonably accurate, even when applied to measurements spanning the Internet, and that it naturally leads to a scalable measurement strategy based on the notion of virtual landmarks.

Peer-to-peer and other decentralized, distributed systems are known to be particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks. In a sybil attack, a malicious user obtains multiple fake identities and pretends to be multiple, distinct nodes in the system. By controlling a large fraction of the nodes in the system, the malicious user is able to “out vote” the honest users in collaborative tasks such as Byzantine failure defenses. This paper presents SybilGuard, anovelprotocolfor limiting the corruptive influences of sybil attacks. Our protocol is based on the “social network ” among user identities, where an edge between two identities indicates a human-established trust relationship. Malicious users can create many identities but few trust relationships. Thus, there is a disproportionately-small “cut ” in the graph between the sybil nodes and the honest nodes. SybilGuard exploits this property to bound the number of identities a malicious user can create. We show the effectiveness of SybilGuard both analytically and experimentally.

We consider the problem of distributing "five" streaming media content to a potentially large and highly dynamic population of hosts. Peer-to-peer content distribution is attractive in this setting because the bandwidth available to serve content scales with demand. A key challenge, however, is making content distribution robust to peer transience. Our approach to providing robustness is to introduce redundancy, both in network paths and in data. We use multiple, diverse distribution trees to provide redundancy in network paths and multiple description coding (MDC) to provide redundancy in data. We present

This paper introduces Lighthouse, a scalable location mechanism for wide-area networks. Unlike existing vector-based systems such as GNP, we show how network-location can be established without using a xed set of reference points. This lets us avoid the communication bottlenecks and single-points-of-failure that otherwise limit the practicality of such systems.