Finding Good Partners in Availability-aware P2P Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of finding peers matching a given availability pattern in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system. We first prove the existence of such patterns in a new trace of the eDonkey network, containing the sessions of 14M peers over 27 days. We also show that, using only 7 days of history, a simple predictor can select predictable peers and successfully predict their online periods for the next week. Then, motivated by practical examples, we specify two formal problems of availability matching that arise in real applications: disconnection matching, where peers look for partners expected to disconnect at the same time, and presence matching, where peers look for partners expected to be online simultaneously in the future. As a scalable and inexpensive solution, we propose to use epidemic protocols for topology management, such as T-Man; we provide corresponding metrics for both matching problems. Finally, we evaluated this solution by simulating two P2P applications over our real trace: task scheduling and file storage. Simulations showed that our simple solution provided good partners fast enough to match the needs of both applications, and that consequently, these applications performed as efficiently at a much lower cost. We believe that this work will be useful for many P2P applications for which it has been shown that choosing good partners, based on their availability, drastically improves their efficiency