Mapping the Gnutella Network: Properties of Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems and Implications for System Design

Despite recent excitement generated by the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm and the surprisingly rapid deployment of some P2P applications, there are few quantitative evaluations of P2P systems behavior. The open architecture, achieved scale, and self-organizing structure of the Gnutella network make it an interesting P2P architecture to study. Like most other P2P applications, Gnutella builds, at the application level, a virtual network with its own routing mechanisms. The topology of this virtual network and the routing mechanisms used have a significant influence on application properties such as performance, reliability, and scalability. We have built a "crawler" to extract the topology of Gnutella's application level network. In this paper we analyze the topology graph and evaluate generated network traffic. Our two major findings are that: (1) although Gnutella is not a pure power-law network, its current configuration has the benefits and drawbacks of a power-law stru...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Matei Ripeanu, Ian T. Foster, Adriana Iamnitchi
• Keywords: CORR 2002, Education, Gnutella, P2P Applications, Virtual Network