Welcome to our Fall 2002 SC546 project website.

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology in networking has gained much attention due to file-sharing applications such as Napster and Gnutella. P2P is much like a distributed file system; it is generally described as having a structure that is not the traditional server-client model. Each node in the network acts as both client and server, requesting data from neighboring nodes as well as routing and serving data for others. The nature of P2P technology makes it well suited for storing multiple copies of document between several nodes, in turn offering reliable access to data and distributing the load of requests. Additionally, the multiple links which exist between nodes almost guarantee that there are multiple paths between any two nodes, making the system more stable as nodes are added and dropped. All of the features inherent in P2P technology promise a network that is dynamic, scalable and reliable.

The recent attention brought to distributed computing and peer-to-peer technology as well as the potential benefits that P2P networks possess will undoubtedly lead to the development of more applications in the field. Since the technology is based on the interaction between nodes, it is difficult to predict the exact nature of a whole network as the number of nodes grows extremely large. The study of the efficiency of queries (requests of data) within the distributed system as well as the effects of adding and dropping nodes on data retrieval will eventually lead to the design of faster and more robust P2P applications in the future.

This project will compare two different implementations of peer-to-peer technology, Chord and Freenet.

In the menu to the left you will see a series of links which will navigate you through our project.

Our project goals were to have a comparative simulation of the CHORD and Freenet peer-to-peer protocols. Due to time constraints pertaining to the complexity of these systems, we were only able to actually simulate Freenet in an extensive manner.

This page presents a detailed description of each protocol, as well as the basic simulation steps we used.

Finally, we have included links to all of the resources we used over the duration of this project.

Enjoy!