Lecture 7: Peer to Peer Networking

The growth of peer to peer technologies has had a profound effect on the internet over the past decade. These systems have pioneered new media distribution mechanisms and in the process spawned legal battles and awakening of popular social movements. This class will examine the core technologies behind Napster, KaZaA, Gnutella, Skype and BitTorrent.

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

• list reasons that led to the creation of P2P networks.
• describe what an overlay network is and how it is different from the internet.
• use historical P2P networks to describe centralized P2P networks, fully distributed P2P networks, hierarchical P2P networks.
• describe search techniques in the various P2P forms, and to analyze search efficiencies.

Outline

• P2P Overview
• Architecture components
• P2P Case Studies
• Napster (Centralized)
• Gnutella (Distributed)
• BitTorrent
• Skype and KaZaA
• KaZaA reverse engineering study

Reading

• KR 2.5
• KaZaA Measurement [Liang2005]

Slides

• L07_P2P.pdf
• L07_P2P.pdf (No background version)

Due

• Paper Review: Liang2005
• Lab #0