Peer-to-peer (Networks)

Introduction

What are peer-to-peer networks
Steven Gordon's lecture on peer-to-peer networks
Peer-to-peer under the hood (video about p2p algorithms)
Peer-to-peer foundation

Proeminent Networks

Napster (26.4M users in 2001)
Gnutella (3M in 2006)
FastTrack (2.4M concurrent users in 2003)
Bitcoin (protocol's whitepaper)
BitTorrent protocol specification (~52k transactions per day, May 2014)
BitMessage (~20k users in Jan 2014)
Twister: a peer-to-peer microblogging network (7.6k known peers in May 2014) -- white paper and website
Coral CDN (p2p content distribution network)
Freenet, distributed anonymous information storage

Theory

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping of P2P Networks (paper)

Distributed Hash Tables

"Original" DHT protocols:

Other:

Koorde
Kademlia
Mainline DHT (BitTorrent's DHT, Kademlia-based)

Other

Useful Implementations

General

DHT

PyDHT
Kademlia implementation in Python
- Uses RPC over UDP

Hash Table Libraries (not distributed)

BDB
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Berkeley DB
LevelDB
bitcask (white paper)
Python 3 dbm module

Distributed Key-Value Stores

Amazon Dynamo (white paper, theory)
Riak (free/libre software implemented in Erlang)

Simulation

Attacks

Sybil attack

NAT Traversal

Types of Network Address Translation implementations:

What is NAT Traversal.

Papers

NAT Traversal Techniques

Infrastructure Protocols (not peer-to-peer)

Serval
uTP (BitTorrent's own protocol for better congestion control than TCP) -- article about BitTorrent over uTP performance compared to BitTorrent over TCP
IP Multicast