CAREER: Advances in Peer-to-Peer Networking

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Metcalfe's law states that the "value" of a network increases with the square of the number of users.However, for most applications, as the number of participants increases, performance degrades, andso too does the value of application to the user. Centralized service and application architecturesare most at risk for not maintaining performance with an increasing user base. Centralized sites canrepresent a processing bottleneck, a single point of failure, or single point ofattack. Furthermore,a single server cannot mitigate for client's poor network conditions in third-party domains. Repli-cating and distributing servers is one solution for solving the problems of centralized architectures. Peer-to-peer services take distribution even further by using collaborative clients who are pre-pared and expected to perform some or all the functions of servers. As new clients bring new loadto the systems, they also bring new resources. Thus, peer-to-peer, collaborative services can be apowerful paradigm: if on average clients bring enough or more than enough resources to balancethe load and cost they incur, then peer-to-peer services can increase in value and performance withthe number of participants. The primary purpose of this proposal is to make fundamental advances in the understanding anddesign of applications and services that make use of replication and collaboration in a peer-to-peerenvironment. Opportunities for the application of peer-to-peer techniques in new disciplines seemlimitless. I propose to examine several applications that are only possible, or achieve their bestperformance, using peer-to-peer architectures and not centralized architectures. These include thenovel peer-to-peer applications of anonymity, secure ad-hoc routing, mobility-based transport forwearable computers, cheat-proof serverless gaming, and distributed information retrieval. There are commonalities to all the numerous peer-to-peer applications we will study: the ex-istence of heterogeneous peer resources, redundancy of offered services at peers, and replication ofapplication data and content. By addressing these issues, the researcher will make important advances in discovery and understanding of peer-to-peer networking and by applying those results to a diverse setof problem areas, the researcher's work will make a broader impact in in fields as diverse as security (privacy, availability, and secure routing), mobile computing, wearable computing, multimedia and gaming,and distributed information retrieval. The major theme of the researcher's proposed educational activities is the involvement of undergraduatesin original research. The goal of the educational proposal is to prepare undergraduate studentsfor graduate school by providing them with an early opportunity toperform research. It consistsof an integrated plan of publishable undergraduate research projects, new course curriculum, thedevelopment of practical lab exercises in networking and network security, distance learning, andminority outreach. By focusing the research of undergraduates on the themes of this proposal, the researcher is ensuring anumber of benefits. First, that the impact of this educational component is tightly integrated withmy research objectives. Second, by coordinating efforts with the director of the Northeast Alliancefor Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NEAGEP), the researcher will improve minority outreach inthe department by preparing and encouraging under-represented minority students to continue onfor doctoral programs at UMass and other universities. Third, the researcher will advance the department'steaching mission by providing a new three-course curriculum of networking and security. Fourth,the researcher will produce a standard set of practical laboratory exercises in networking and network security to be used at any university. Finally, the availability ofmy curriculum and practical exercises, aswell as UMass's existing Video Instruction Program and MANIC distance learning programs, willincrease the external impact of the curriculum.