FOR 733:  Improvement of the Quality of Peer-to-Peer Systems by Systematically Researching Quality Features and their Interdependencies

• Subject Area: Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2006 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 21768296

The significance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) increased enormously over the last few years. With regard to traffic volume P2P systems are replacing more and more the world wide web (WWW), until now the predominant application on the internet. These P2P applications are based on a communication paradigm that is fundamentally different from that of the WWW and other traditional (client-server) applications, raising questions about suitable mechanisms for this paradigm where performance and quality are concerned. The objective of the Research Unit is to enhance the quality of P2P systems by systematically researching suitable mechanisms. Specific quality features will be applied to assess the quality of the P2P systems. This will be achieved by using and comparing it to centralised procedures as the respective reference points. A multitude of interdependencies exists between the various quality features. While a flooding of the system with routing messages may increase the reliability, it may, however, also entail a deterioration in the performance or efficiency of the network. These are the conflicts we want to investigate further. Based on two different reference settings, we will research how these conflicts can be resolved within the context of a system. For the first reference scenario, we will design and investigate a decentralised P2P based communication system; it is particularly suitable for disaster situations, when an outage of the central infrastructure occurs in order to compensate (at least partially) for this outage. In the second reference setting we will explore the integration of software development tools with P2P techniques. This second setting calls for high security and trustability requirements to enable the developers from different organisations and locations to work on a concerted project, for example Open Source development, without having to use a central server.
The results from this Research Unit should also provide the answers to the questions
(1) in which areas P2P systems are superior to centrally controlled systems,
(2) what will be the consequences for the further systematic development and
(3) what other (maybe until now even somewhat ignored) applications may be obtained from the P2P paradigm?
The Research Unit is organised into the following subprojects: adaptivity, efficiency, validity and trust. All subprojects do also work for the two reference scenarios.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Qualität von Managementmechansimen und P2P-Anwendungen (Applicants Mühlhäuser, Max ;  Strufe, Thorsten )
• Qualität von P2P-Echtzeitmechanismen (Applicants Buchmann, Alejandro P. ;  Effelsberg, Wolfgang )
• Qualität von P2P-Suchoverlaynetzwerken (Applicants Liebau, Nicolas ;  Steinmetz, Ralf ;  Wehrle, Klaus )
• Qualität von P2P-System- und Dokumenten-Management (Applicants Schürr, Andreas ;  Steinmetz, Ralf )
• Untersuchung und Verbesserung der Effizienz von P2P-Systemen (Applicant Heckmann, Oliver )
• Untersuchung und Verbesserung der Vertrauenswürdigkeit von P2P-Systemen (Applicant Eckert, Claudia )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr.-Ing. Ralf Steinmetz