BitTorrent (BT) has carried out a significant and continuously increasing portion of Internet traffic. While several designs have been recently proposed and implemented to improve the resource utilization by bridging the application layer (overlay) and the network layer (underlay), these designs are largely dependent on Internet infrastructures, such as ISPs and CDNs. In addition, they also demand large-scale deployments of their systems to work effectively. Consequently, they require multiefforts far beyond individual users' ability to be widely used in the Internet. In this paper, aiming at building an infrastructure-independent user-level facility, we present our design, implementation, and evaluation of a topology-aware BT system, called TopBT, to significantly improve the overall Internet resource utilization without degrading user downloading performance. The unique feature of TopBT client lies in that a TopBT client actively discovers network proximities (to connected peers), and uses both proximities and transmission rates to maintain fast downloading while reducing the transmitting distance of the BT traffic and thus the Internet traffic. As a result, a TopBT client neither requires feeds from major Internet infrastructures, such as ISPs or CDNs, nor requires large-scale deployment of other TopBT clients on the Internet to work effectively. We have implemented TopBT based on widely used open-source BT client code base, and made the software publicly available. By deploying TopBT and other BitTorrent clients on hundreds of Internet hosts, we show that on average TopBT can reduce about 25% download traffic while achieving a 15% faster download speed compared to several prevalent BT clients. TopBT has been widely used in the Internet by many users all over the world.

Effective caching in the domain name system (DNS) is critical to its performance and scalability. Existing DNS only supports weak cache consistency by using the time-to-live (TTL) mechanism, which functions reasonably well in normal situations. However, maintaining strong cache consistency in DNS as an indispensable exceptional handling mechanism has become more and more demanding for three important objectives: 1) to quickly respond and handle exceptions such as sudden and dramatic Internet failures caused by natural and human disasters, 2) to adapt increasingly frequent changes of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses due to the introduction of dynamic DNS techniques for various stationed and mobile devices on the Internet, and 3) to provide fine-grain controls for content delivery services to timely balance server load distributions. With agile adaptation to various exceptional Internet dynamics, strong DNS cache consistency improves the availability and reliability of Internet services. In this paper, we first conduct extensive Internet measurements to quantitatively characterize DNS dynamics. Then, we propose a proactive DNS cache update protocol (DNScup), running as middleware in DNS name servers, to provide strong cache consistency for DNS. The core of DNScup is an optimal lease scheme, called dynamic lease, to keep track of the local DNS name servers. We compare dynamic lease with other existing lease schemes through theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations. Based on the DNS dynamic update protocol, we build a DNScup prototype with minor modifications to the current DNS implementation. Our system prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of DNScup and its easy and incremental deployment on the Internet.

Object detection quality and network lifetime are two conflicting aspects of a sensor network, but both are critical to many sensor applications such as military surveillance. Partial coverage, where a sensing field is partially sensed by active sensors at any time, is an appropriate approach to balancing the two conflicting design requirements of monitoring applications. Under partial coverage, we develop an analytical framework for object detection in sensor networks, and mathematically analyze average-case object detection quality in random and synchronized sensing scheduling protocols. Our analytical framework facilitates performance evaluation of a sensing schedule, network deployment, and sensing scheduling protocol design. Furthermore, we propose three wave sensing scheduling protocols to achieve bounded worst-case object detection quality. We justify the correctness of our analyses through rigorous proof, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocols through extensive simulation experiments

Effective caching in Domain Name System (DNS) is critical to its performance and scalability. Existing DNS only supports weak cache consistency by using the Time-To-Live (TTL) mechanism, which functions reasonably well in normal situations. However, maintaining strong cache consistency in DNS as an indispensable exceptional handling mechanismhas become more and more demanding for three important objectives: (1) to quickly respond and handle exceptional incidents, such as sudden and dramatic Internet failures caused by natural and human disasters, (2) to adapt increasingly frequent changes of IP addresses due to the introduction of dynamic DNS techniques for various stationed and mobile devices on the Internet, and (3) to provide finegrain controls for content delivery services to timely balance server load distributions. With agile adaptation to various exceptional Internet dynamics, strong DNS cache consistency improves the availability and reliability of Internet services. In this paper, we propose a proactive DNS cache update protocol, called DNScup, running as middleware in DNS nameservers, to provide strong cache consistency for DNS. The core of DNScup is a dynamic lease technique to keep track of the local DNS nameservers, whose clients need cache coherence to avoid losing service availability. Based on the DNS Dynamic Update protocol, we have built a DNScup prototype with minor modifications to the current DNS implementation. Our trace-driven simulation and system prototype demonstrate the effectiveness of DNScup and its easy and incremental deployment on the Internet.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has been successfully applied in Internet telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), such as the Skype system, where P2P is used for both searching clients and relaying voice packets. Selecting one or multiple suitable peers to relay voice packets is a critical factor for the quality, scalability and cost of a VoIP system. In this paper, we first present two sets of intensive Internet measurement results to confirm the benefits gained by peer relays in VoIP, and to investigate the performance of the Skype system. We obtain the following results: (1) many relay peer selections are suboptimal; (2) the waiting time to select a relay node can be quite long; and (3) there are a large number of unnecessary probes, resulting in heavy network traffic to limit scalability of the VoIP system. Our further analysis shows that two main reasons cause these problems. First, the peer selections do not take Autonomous System (AS) topology into consideration, and second, the complex communication relationships among peers are not well utilized. Motivated by our measurements and analysis, we propose an AS-aware peer-relay protocol called ASAP. Our objective is to significantly improve VoIP quality and system scalability with low overhead. Our intensive evaluation by trace-driven simulation shows ASAP is highly effective and easy to implement on the Internet for building large and scalable VoIP systems.

While current peer-to-peer (P2P) systems facilitate static file sharing, newly developed applications demand that P2P systems be able to manage dynamically changing files. Maintaining consistency between frequently updated files and their replicas is a fundamental reliability requirement for a P2P system. In this paper, we present SCOPE, a structured P2P system supporting consistency among a large number of replicas. By building a replica-partition-tree (RPT) for each key, SCOPE keeps track of the locations of replicas and then propagates update notifications. Our theoretical analyses and experimental results demonstrate that SCOPE can effectively maintain replica consistency while preventing hot spot and node-failure problems. Its efficiency in maintenance and failure-recovery is particularly attractive to the deployment of large-scale P2P systems.

The demand of delivering streaming media content in the Internet has become increasingly high for scientific, educational, and commercial applications. Three representative technologies have been developed for this purpose, each of which has its merits and serious limitations. Infrastructure-based CDNs with dedicated network bandwidths and powerful media replicas can provide high quality streaming services but at a high cost. Server-based proxies are cost-effective but not scalable due to the limited proxy capacity and its centralized control. Client-based P2P networks are scalable but do not guarantee high quality streaming service due to the transient nature of peers. To address these limitations, we present a novel and efficient design of a scalable and reliable media proxy system supported by P2P networks. This system is called PROP abbreviated from our technical theme of "collaborating and coordinating PROxy and its P2P clients". Our objective is to address both scalability and reliability issues of streaming media delivery in a cost-effective way. In the PROP system, the clients' machines in an intranet are self-organized into a structured P2P system to provide a large media storage and to actively participate in the streaming media delivery, where the proxy is also embedded as an important member to ensure quality of streaming service. The coordination and collaboration in the system are efficiently conducted by our P2P management structure and replacement policies. We have comparatively evaluated our system by trace-driven simulations with synthetic workloads and with a real-life workload trace extracted from the media server logs in an enterprise network. The results show that our design significantly improves the quality of media streaming and the system scalability.

Summary form only given. A peer-to-peer (P2P) system is built upon an overlay network whose topology is independent of the underlying physical network. A well-routed message path in an overlay network with a small number of logical hops can result in a long delay and excessive traffic due to undesirably long distances in some physical links. We propose an effective method, called SAT-Match, to adoptively construct structured P2P overlay networks, aiming at significantly reducing the lookup routing latency. In this method, each joining peer is initially guided to find a physically close neighbor to connect with. After then, its overlay location is adoptively adjusted whenever a location mismatch is detected. The topology matching optimization in our method solely relies on local neighborhood information. Compared with existing topology matching methods, our method addresses their three limitations: (1) heavily relying on global information about the Internet by using landmark-based measurements, (2) lacking adaptation to frequent peer movement in a dynamic environment, such as mobile networks, and (3) insufficiently accurate in topology matching due to the lack of adaptive topology adjustment. We have evaluated our method in the content-addressable network (CAN), a representative structured P2P system with a strong tolerance to frequent peer arrivals/departures. Through intensive simulation experiments on large scale CAN overlays, we have shown the effectiveness of SAT-Match. Our method can achieve average logical/physical link latency reduction rate by up to 40%. It also outperforms "landmark binning", a method utilizing global information by up to 20%. Finally, combining with the landmark binning method, SAT-Match can achieve up to 60% latency reduction.