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Understanding churn in peer-to-peer networks

Published: 25 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The dynamics of peer participation, or churn, are an inherent property of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and critical for design and evaluation. Accurately characterizing churn requires precise and unbiased information about the arrival and departure of peers, which is challenging to acquire. Prior studies show that peer participation is highly dynamic but with conflicting characteristics. Therefore, churn remains poorly understood, despite its significance.In this paper, we identify several common pitfalls that lead to measurement error. We carefully address these difficulties and present a detailed study using three widely-deployed P2P systems: an unstructured file-sharing system (Gnutella), a content-distribution system (BitTorrent), and a Distributed Hash Table (Kad). Our analysis reveals several properties of churn: (i) overall dynamics are surprisingly similar across different systems, (ii) session lengths are not exponential, (iii) a large portion of active peers are highly stable while the remaining peers turn over quickly, and (iv) peer session lengths across consecutive appearances are correlated. In summary, this paper advances our understanding of churn by improving accuracy, comparing different P2P file sharingdistribution systems, and exploring new aspects of churn.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
October 2006
356 pages
ISBN:1595935614
DOI:10.1145/1177080
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. Gnutella
  2. bitTorrent
  3. churn
  4. kad
  5. peer-to-peer
  6. session length
  7. uptime

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IMC06
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IMC06: Internet Measurement Conference
October 25 - 27, 2006
Rio de Janeriro, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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