Small-World File-Sharing Communities
Speaker:Adriana Iamnitchi
(02/25/2004)
Abstract
Web caches, content distribution networks, peer-to-peer file
sharing networks, distributed file systems, and data grids all have in
common that they involve a community of users who generate requests for
shared data. In each case, overall system performance can be improved
significantly if we can first identify and then exploit interesting
structure within a community's access patterns. To this end, we propose a
novel perspective on file sharing that considers the relationships that
form among users based on the files in which they are interested. We
propose a new structure that captures common user interests in data---the
\textit{data-sharing graph}--- and justify its utility with studies on
three data-distribution systems: a high-energy physics collaboration, the
Web, and the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. We find small-world patterns in
the data-sharing graphs of all three communities. We analyze these graphs
and propose some probable causes for these emergent small-world patterns.
The significance of small-world patterns is twofold: it provides a
rigorous support to intuition and, perhaps most importantly, it suggests
ways to design mechanisms that exploit these naturally emerging patterns.
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Jaidev Patwardhan
Last modified: Tue Jan 27 15:26:39 EST 2004