pax

Trackers are used in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for provider discovery, that is, mapping resources to potential providers. Centralized trackers, e.g., as used in the original BitTorrent protocol, do not benefit from P2P properties, such as no single point of failure, scalability, and load balancing. Therefore, decentralized mechanisms have been proposed, based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) and gossiping, such as BitTorrent's Peer Exchange (PEX). While DHT-based trackers suffer from load balancing problems, gossip-based ones cannot deliver new mappings quickly. This paper presents B-Tracker, a fully-distributed pull-based tracker. The main idea of B-Tracker is that all peers holding a certain resource become themselves a tracker for the respective resource, while also announcing themselves on other trackers. Bloom filters are used to avoid redundant mappings to be transmitted. This results in the important properties of load balancing and scalability, while adding the ability for peers to fetch new mappings instantly. Experiments show that B-Tracker has improved load balancing and reaches more efficiency when compared to DHTs and PEX.

B-Tracker: improving load balancing and efficiency in distr...

B-Tracker: improving load balancing and efficiency in distributed P2P trackers

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