AbstractsComputer Science

In this thesis, the behaviour of the Gnutella peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network is examined and a proposal is put forth to improve its performance. Gnutella’s overlay topology is not well matched to the underlying physical network and the network therefore exhibits sub-optimal performance in terms of message latency. In order to evaluate this performance, we modified an existing Gnutella simulation framework developed for the ns-2 simulator to gather information about query and query hit propagation. The protocol implemented in the simulation was then modified to use the Vivaldi synthetic coordinate system in order to bias neighbour selection to favour nodes that are "close" in the Euclidean sense. Simulations showed that the modified Gnutella protocol yielded an improvement in both query and query hit propagation times.