Burkhard Stiller B - Tracker : improving load balancing and efficiency in distributed P 2 P trackers

Trackers are used in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for provider discovery, that is, mapping resources to potential providers. Centralized trackers, e.g., as in the original BitTorrent protocol, do not benefit from P2P properties, such as no single point of failure, scalability, and load balancing. Decentralized mechanisms have thus been proposed, based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) and gossiping, such as BitTorrent’s Peer Exchange (PEX). While DHT-based trackers suffer from load balancing problems, gossip-based ones cannot deliver new mappings quickly. This paper presents B-Tracker, a fullydistributed, pull-based tracker. B-Tracker extends DHT functionality by distributing the tracker load among all providers in a swarm. Bloom filters are used to avoid redundant mappings to be transmitted. This results in the important properties of load balancing and scalability, while adding the ability for peers to fetch new mappings instantly. B-Tracker shows, through simulations, improved load balancing and better efficiency when compared to pure DHTs and PEX. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/P2P.2011.6038749 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-55818 Accepted Version Originally published at: Hecht, Fabio V; Bocek, Thomas; Stiller, Burkhard (2011). B-Tracker: Improving load balancing and efficiency in distributed P2P trackers. In: IEEE P2P 2011, Kyoto, Japan, 31 August 2011 31 August 2011, 310-313. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/P2P.2011.6038749 Fabio Hecht Thomas Bocek Burkhard Stiller B-Tracker: improving load balancing and efficiency in distributed P2P trackers April 2011 University of Zurich Department of Informatics (IFI) Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH-8050 Zürich, Switzerland ifi T E C H N IC A L R E P O R T – N o. 20 11 .IF I-2 01 1. 00 03