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Chapter: Distributed Systems : Peer To Peer Services and File System

Peer-To-Peer (P2P)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

PEER-TO-PEER SYSTEMS

 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

 

Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network and width, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided. Emerging collaborative P2P systems are going beyond the era of peers doing similar things while sharing resources, and are looking for diverse peers that can bring in unique resources and capabilities to a virtual community thereby empowering it to engage in greater tasks beyond those that can be accomplished by individual peers, yet that are beneficial to all the peers.

 

While P2P systems had previously been used in many application domains, the architecture was popularized by the file sharing system Napster, originally released in 1999. The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. In such social contexts, peer-to-peer as a meme refers to theegalitarian social networking that has emerged throughout society, enabled by Internettechnologies in general.

 

The demand for services in the Internet can be expected to grow to a scale that is limited only by the size of the world’s population. The goal of peer-to-peer systems is to enable the sharing of data and resources on a very large scale by eliminating any requirement for separately managed servers and their associated infrastructure. The scope for expanding popular services by adding to the number of the computers hosting them is limited when all the hosts must be owned and managed by the service provider. Administration and fault recovery costs tend to dominate. The network bandwidth that can be provided to a single server site over available physical links is also a major constraint. System-level services such as Sun NFS (Section 12.3), the Andrew File System (Section 12.4) or video servers (Section 20.6.1) and application-level services such as Google, Amazon or eBay all exhibit this problem to varying degrees.

 

Peer-to-peer systems aim to support useful distributed services and applications using data and computing resources available in the personal computers and workstations that are present in the Internet and other networks in ever-increasing numbers. This is increasingly attractive as the performance difference between desktop and server machines narrows and broadband network connections proliferate. But there is another, broader aim: has defined peer-topeer applications as

 

‘applications that exploit resources available at the edges of the Internet – storage, cycles, content, human presence’. Each type of resource sharing mentioned in that definition is already represented by distributed applications available for most types of personal computer. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some general techniques that simplify the construction of peer-to-peer applications and enhance their scalability, reliability and security.

 

Traditional client-server systems manage and provide access to resources such as files, web pages or other information objects located on a single server computer or a small cluster of tightly coupled servers. With such centralized designs, few decisions are required about the placement of the resources or the management of server hardware resources, but the scale of the service is limited by the server hardware capacity and network connectivity. Peer-to-peer systems provide access to information resources located on computers throughout a network (whether it be the Internet or a corporate network). Algorithms for the placement and subsequent retrieval of information objects are a key aspect of the system design. The aim is to deliver a service that is fully decentralized and self-organizing, dynamically balancing the storage and processing loads between all the participating computers as computers join and leave the service. Peer-to-peer systems share these characteristics:

 

Their design ensures that each user contributes resources to the system.

 

Although they may differ in the resources that they contribute, all the nodes in a peer-to-peer system have the same functional capabilities and responsibilities.

 

Their correct operation does not depend on the existence of any centrally administered systems.

 

They can be designed to offer a limited degree of anonymity to the providers and users of resources.

 

A key issue for their efficient operation is the choice of an algorithm for the placement of data across many hosts and subsequent access to it in a manner that balances the workload and ensures availability without adding undue overheads.

 

Napster and its legacy

 

The first application in which a demand for a globally scalable information storage and retrieval service emerged was the downloading of digital music files. Both the need for and the feasibility of a peer-to-peer solution were first demonstrated by the Napster filesharing system [OpenNap 2001] which provided a means for users to share files. Napster became very popular for music exchange soon after its launch in 1999. At its peak, several million users were registered and thousands were swapping music files simultaneously. Napster’s architecture included centralized indexes, but users supplied the files, which were stored and accessed on their personal computers. Napster’s method of operation is illustrated by the sequence of steps shown in Figure 10.2.



Note that in step 5clients are expected to add their own music files to the pool of shared resources by transmitting a link to the Napster indexing service for each available file. Thus the motivation for Napster and the key to its success was the making available of a large, widely distributed set of files to users throughout the Internet, fulfilling Shirky’s dictum by providing access to ‘shared resources at the edges of the Internet’. Napster was shut down as a result of legal proceedings instituted against the operators of the Napster service by the owners of the copyright in some of the material (i.e., digitally encoded music) that was made available on it (see the box below). Anonymity for the receivers and the providers of shared data and other resources is a concern for the designers of peer-to-peer systems. In systems with many nodes, the routing of requests and results can be made sufficiently tortuous to conceal their source and the contents of files can be distributed across multiple nodes, spreading the responsibility for making them available. Mechanisms for anonymous communication that are resistant to most forms of traffic analysis are available If files are also encrypted before they are placed on servers, the owners of the servers can plausibly deny any knowledge of the contents. But these anonymity techniques add to the cost of resource sharing, and recent work has shown that the anonymity available is weak against some attacks The Freenet projects are focused on providing Internet-wide file services that offer anonymity for the providers and users of the shared files. Ross Anderson has proposed the Eternity Service , a storage service that provides long-term guarantees of data

 

Peer-to-peer systems and copyright ownership issues

 

The developers of Napster argued that they were not liable for the infringement of the copyright owners’ rights because they were not participating in the copying process, which was performed entirely between users’ machines. Their argument failed because the index servers were deemed an essential part of the process. Since the index servers were located at well-known addresses, their operators were unable to remain anonymous and so could be targeted in lawsuits.

 

A more fully distributed file-sharing service might have achieved a better separation of legal responsibilities, spreading the responsibility across all of the users and thus making the pursuit of legal remedies very difficult, if not impossible.

 

Whatever view one takes about the legitimacy of file copying for the purpose of sharing copyright-protected material, there are legitimate social and political justifications for the anonymity of clients and servers in some application contexts. The most persuasive justification arises when anonymity is used to overcome censorship and maintain freedom of expression for individuals in oppressive societies or organizations. It is known that email and web sites have played a significant role in achieving public awareness at times of political crisis in such societies; their role could be strengthened if the authors could be protected by anonymity.

 

Peer-to-peer middleware systems are designed specifically to meet the need for the automatic placement and subsequent location of the distributed objects managed by peer-to-peer systems and applications.

 

Functional requirements • The function of peer-to-peer middleware is to simplify the construction of services that are implemented across many hosts in a widely distributed network. To achieve this it must enable clients to locate and communicate with any individual resource made available to a service, even though the resources are widely distributed amongst the hosts. Other important requirements include the ability to add new resources and to remove them at will and to add hosts to the service and remove them. Like other middleware, peer-to-peer middleware should offer a simple programming interface to application programmers that is independent of the types of distributed resource that the application manipulates.

 

Non-functional requirements • To perform effectively, peer-to-peer middleware must also address the following non-functional requirements

 

Global scalability: One of the aims of peer-to-peer applications is to exploit the hardware resources of very large numbers of hosts connected to the Internet. Peer-topeer middleware must therefore be designed to support applications that access millions of objects on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of hosts.

 

Load balancing: The performance of any system designed to exploit a large number of computers depends upon the balanced distribution of workload across them. For the systems we are considering, this will be achieved by a random placement of resources together with the use of replicas of heavily used resources.

 

Optimization for local interactions between neighbouring peers: The ‘network distance’ between nodes that interact has a substantial impact on the latency of individual interactions, such as client requests for access to resources. Network traffic loadings are also impacted by it. The middleware should aim to place resources close to the nodes that access them the most.

 

Accommodating to highly dynamic host availability: Most peer-to-peer systems are constructed from host computers that are free to join or leave the system at any time. The hosts and network segments used in peer-to-peer systems are not owned or managed by any single authority; neither their reliability nor their continuous participation in the provision of a service is guaranteed. A major challenge for peerto- peer systems is to provide a dependable service despite these facts. As hosts join the system, they must be integrated into the system and the load must be redistributed

 

to exploit their resources. When they leave the system whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the system must detect their departure and redistribute their load and resources.

 

Routing overlays

 

In peer-to-peer systems a distributed algorithm known as a routing overlay takes responsibility for locating nodes and objects. The name denotes the fact that the middleware takes the form of a layer that is responsible for routing requests from any client to a host that holds the object to which the request is addressed. The objects of interest may be placed at and subsequently relocated to any node in the network without client involvement. It is termed an overlay since it implements a routing mechanism in the application layer that is quite separate from any other routing mechanisms deployed at the network level such as IP routing. The routing overlay ensures that any node can access any object by routing each request through a sequence of nodes, exploiting knowledge at each of them to locate the destination object. Peer-to-peer systems usually store multiple replicas of objects to ensure availability. In that case, the routing overlay maintains knowledge of the location of all the available replicas and delivers requests to the nearest ‘live’ node (i.e. one that has not failed) that has a copy of the relevant object. The GUIDs used to identify nodes and objects are an example of the ‘pure’ names. These are also known as opaque identifiers, since they reveal nothing about the locations of the objects to which they refer. The main task of a routing overlay is the following:

 

Routing of requests to objects: A client wishing to invoke an operation on an object submits a request including the object’s GUID to the routing overlay, which routes the request to a node at which a replica of the object resides.

 

But the routing overlay must also perform some other tasks:

 

Insertion of objects: A node wishing to make a new object available to a peer-to-peer service computes a GUID for the object and announces it to the routing overlay,which then ensures that the object is reachable by all other clients.

 

Deletion of objects: When clients request the removal of objects from the service the routing overlay must make them unavailable.

 

Node addition and removal: Nodes (i.e., computers) may join and leave the service. When a node joins the service, the routing overlay arranges for it to assume some of the responsibilities of other nodes. When a node leaves (either voluntarily or as a result of a system or network fault), its responsibilities are distributed amongst the other nodes.

 


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