A P2P-Based Infrastructure for Adaptive Trustworthy and Efficient Communication in Wide-Area Distributed Systems

Tremendous advances in pervasive networking have enabled wide-area distributed systems to connect distributed resources or users such as corporate data centers and high-performance computing centers. These distributed pervasive systems take advantage of resources and enhance collaborations worldwide. However, due to lack of central management, they are severely threatened by a variety of malicious users in today's Internet. Current reputation- and anonymity-based technologies for node communication enhance system trustworthiness. However, most of these technologies gain trustworthiness at the cost of efficiency degradation. This paper presents a P2P-based infrastructure for trustworthy and efficient node communication in wide-area distributed systems. It jointly addresses trustworthiness and efficiency in its operation in order to meet the high-performance requirements of a diversified wealth of distributed pervasive applications. The infrastructure includes two policies: trust/efficiency-oriented request routing and trust-based adaptive anonymous response forwarding. This infrastructure not only offers a trustworthy environment with anonymous communication but also enhances overall system efficiency through harmonious trustworthiness and efficiency trade-offs. Experimental results from simulations and the real-world PlanetLab testbed show the superior performance of the P2P-based infrastructure in achieving both high trustworthiness and high efficiency in comparison to other related approaches.

1. Introduction

The immense popularity of the Internet has provided a significant stimulus to the advancement of wide-area distributed pervasive systems that provide high scalability, efficiency, and other benefits not found in centralized models. These Internet-based distributed pervasive systems (e.g., corporate data centers and high-performance computing centers) attract Internet users from across the world to donate their computer resources for various objectives ranging from file sharing to distributed computing, from instant messaging to content distribution. For example, over the past year, the total traffic on the BitTorrent P2P file sharing application has increased by 12 percent, driven by 25 percent increases in per-peer hourly download volume [1], and 471.5 million users in one day connect to the Akamai P2P-assisted content delivery network (CDN) [2].