Resilience of Structured Peer to Peer Systems: Analysis and Enhancement

In this paper, we attempt to provide an extensive and detailed summary of existing work in the area of Structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems resilience. The coverage in this paper includes resilience metrics, threats, approaches to analyze resilience and enhancements proposed to individual system design features to enhance resilience. Specifically, we first discuss important design features of popular structured P2P systems, the performance metrics and several possible threats and attack scenarios that threaten the performance of structured P2P systems. We then provide a broad overview of approaches to analyze resilience employed by researchers in this area. Following this, we describe an analytical approach developed by us to analyze resilience of structured P2P systems. Our approach is Markov-Chain based and can be applied to analyze systems with relatively stable size and uniformly distributed nodes. We then discuss the insights we obtain on resilience using our analytical approach. Following in the same direction, we then discuss enhancements to individual P2P system design features that have been proposed by researchers to increase overall system resilience. We then discuss two of our enhancements, namely CAN-SW (CAN Small World) and RChord (Reverse Chord) to enhance resilience of the CAN and Chord system respectively. Our approaches to design these enhancements derive inspiration from the importance of redundancy and the richness in graph-theory.