Peer-to-Peer Networks

Topic Description

Peer-to-peer, or P2P in its abbreviated form, refers to a computer network where all the nodes are referred to as peers, and they share and exchange resources. In contrast to the client-server architecture, each node in a P2P network is equal to the others, there is no centralized server that offers services and resources. The P2P paradigm was introduced in the 2000s mainly for file and music sharing applications and has undergone an impressive acceleration in the last years due to the success of the blockchain. Due to this renewal, several interesting projects have come to life, such as the Protocol Lab project, whose goal is to build the next-generation Internet, evolving the structure of the Internet and the Web toward a decentralized architecture. The lessons learned in the definition of first-generation P2P systems like Bitcoin, Kademlia, and Git are currently exploited in the project. Furthermore, the development of P2P applications is currently easier due to the availability of several tools. LibP2P offers several functionalities, like publish-subscribe API, gossip support, NAT transversal mechanism. IPFS is a global, versioned, peer-to-peer file system providing an interface as simple as HTTP, but with permanence built-in. Even if these tools are currently available, the development of P2P applications requires further research to make these systems accessible on a worldwide scale.

Papers

    • Managing Communities in Decentralised Social Environments, B. Guidi, A. Michienzi and L. Ricci, accepted for publication in Springer Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, July 2022

  • AoI-based Multicast Routing over Voronoi Overlays with Minimal Overhead, Michele Albano, Matteo Mordacchini, Laura Ricci, IEEE Access, September 2020

  • Service Provisioning in Mobile Environments through Opportunistic Computing, M. Conti, D. Mascitti, A. Passarella, L. Ricci, IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing, 2014

  • A Logical Key Hierarchy based approach to preserve content privacy in Decentralized Online Social Networks , A. De Salve, R. Di Pietro, P. Mori, L, Ricci, IEEE Transaction on Dependable and Secure Computing

  • SONIC-MAN: A distributed Protocol for Dynamic Community Detection and Management, B. Guidi, A. Michienzi, L. Guidi, DAIS 2017

  • A libP2P implementation of the Bitcoin block exchange protocol, Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, Laura Ricci, 2nd Int. Workshop on Distributed Infrastructures for Common Goods (DICG'21), in conjunction with Middleware 2021, 22nd ACM/IFIP Int. Conference, 6-10 December 2021,


Software and Dataset