Consistency maintenance in peer-to-peer file sharing networks

Abstract

While the current generation of peer-to-peer networks share predominantly static files, future peer-to-peer networks will support sharing of files that are modified frequently by their users. We present techniques to maintain temporal consistency of replicated files in a peer-to-peer network. We consider the Gnutella P2P network and present techniques for maintaining consistency in Gnutella even when peers containing replicated files dynamically join and leave the network. An experimental evaluation of our techniques shows that: (i) a hybrid approach based on push and pull achieves high fidelity in highly dynamic P2P networks and (ii) the run-time overheads of our techniques are small, making them a practical choice for P2P networks.