Finding close friends on the Internet

TitleFinding close friends on the Internet
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2001
AuthorsKommareddy C, Shankar N, Bhattacharjee B
Conference NameNetwork Protocols, 2001. Ninth International Conference on
Date Published2001/11//
Keywordsapplication-layer;, application-peers;, Beaconing;, beacons;, close, distance, Expanding, friends;, Internet-like, Internet;, IP;, measurement, nearby, network, peer-location, points;, protocols;, Ring, searches;, service;, solutions;, testbed;, topologies;, topology;, transport, Triangulation;, unicast-only, wide-area
Abstract

We consider the problem of finding nearby application-peers (close friends) over the Internet. We focus on unicast-only solutions and introduce a new scheme -Beaconing-for finding peers that are near. Our scheme uses distance measurement points (called beacons) and can be implemented entirely in the application-layer without investing in large infrastructure changes. We present an extensive evaluation of Beaconing and compare it to existing schemes including Expanding Ring searches and Triangulation. Our experiments show that 3-8 beacons are sufficient to provide efficient peer-location service on 10 000 node Internet-like topologies. Further, our results are 2-5 times more accurate than existing techniques. We also present results from an implementation of Beaconing over a non-trivial wide-area testbed. In our experiments, Beaconing is able to efficiently (< 3 K Bytes and < 50 packets on average), quickly (< 1 second on average), and accurately (< 20 ms error on average) find nearby peers on the Internet.

DOI10.1109/ICNP.2001.992910