Making gnutella-like P2P systems scalable

  • Authors:
  • Yatin Chawathe;Sylvia Ratnasamy;Lee Breslau;Nick Lanham;Scott Shenker

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs--Research;Intel Research;AT&T Labs-Research;UC Berkeley;ICSI

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Napster pioneered the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing, and supported it with a centralized file search facility. Subsequent P2P systems like Gnutella adopted decentralized search algorithms. However, Gnutella's notoriously poor scaling led some to propose distributed hash table solutions to the wide-area file search problem. Contrary to that trend, we advocate retaining Gnutella's simplicity while proposing new mechanisms that greatly improve its scalability. Building upon prior research [1, 12, 22], we propose several modifications to Gnutella's design that dynamically adapt the overlay topology and the search algorithms in order to accommodate the natural heterogeneity present in most peer-to-peer systems. We test our design through simulations and the results show three to five orders of magnitude improvement in total system capacity. We also report on a prototype implementation and its deployment on a testbed.