Slashdot Mirror
Stanford P2P Group Releases Software and Analysis
Bert690 writes "Apropos of yesterday's Slashdot story on BitTorrent: Some folks at Stanford have released a paper on P2P "bucket brigade"-like streaming that contains *an actual analysis* and a downloadable implementation."
Could this be considered actual research on the subject of p2p networks and
scalability?
Read it here
You can get several versions of this from this page, including a pdf version or a plain text version.
P2P research by well known research institutions is far from unheard of. MIT has Chord which is a project to produce robust scalable distributed systems using peer to peer ideas. They have an efficient hash lookup algorithm that could form the basis of many p2p systems and they have code available for download.
There is lots of P2P Research going on.
Check this out:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/Conferences/IPTPS02/
This happened this month at MIT.
Abstract
The high bandwidth required by live streaming video greatly limits the number of clients that can be served by a source. In this work, we discuss and evaluate an architecture, called SpreadIt, for streaming live media over a network of clients, using the resources of the clients themselves. Using SpreadIt, we can distribute bandwidth requirements over the network. The key challenge is to allow an application level multicast tree to be easily maintained over a network of transient peers, while ensuring that quality of service does not degrade. We propose a basic peering infrastructure layer for streaming applications, which uses a redirect primitive to meet the challenge successfully. Through empirical and simulation studies, we show that SpreadIt provides a good quality of service, which degrades gracefully with increasing number of clients. Perhaps more significantly, existing applications can be made to work with SpreadIt, without any change to their code base. The paper is more about solving the problems with streaming multicasts. That is, it is prohibitively expensive for small time providers to stream to more than a few users.
I work for an unlicensed college radio station, and since our broadcast radius is so small, we stream everything with RealAudio (not my choice) once we hit about 20 online listeners or so, things start crapping out.
We're upgrading our server, but that won't change things dramatically. This paper suggests a way that high bandwidth listeners could relay the stream and reduce the server's load. It uses P2P software, but the focus is streaming.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Another p2p project at berkeley: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravenben/tapestry/
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I agree with the others that p2p research is nothing new, although it's just starting to get "hot". In fact, there are several conferences devoted to p2p research papers, e.g.:
http://www.ida.liu.se/conferences/p2p/p2p2
Academic institutions have done plenty of P2P research. The paper titled Overcast certainly resembles this one, but it's a year old. As mentioned above, Chord was a great paper. Pastry, done in cooperation with Microsoft Research, falls into the same category. Peer to Peer research is highly active at universities; I should know, as I'm doing some myself right now at Duke.