TITLE:
Performance Evaluation of Proactive Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Application for Releasing Network Congestion of Backbone Network in an Intranet
AUTHORS:
Chih-Chin Liang
KEYWORDS:
Network Traffic; Peer-to-Peer; Backbone Network; Network Management; Intranet
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.5 No.8,
August
28,
2012
ABSTRACT: Peer-to-peer (P2P) application could be viewed as fast pull-based file-sharing system. P2P methods can deliver large files by dividing them into small chunks. However, P2P implementations employ greedy delivering strategies that can easily congest backbone network, but all kinds of data must be delivered on the backbone network. Through P2P methods, most of the connections available to a file host are occupied through pull-based methods by file retrievers. This limits the ability of the host to deliver any other data. P2P applications flood the backbone network with packets, thus leading to congestion. As a result, such P2P applications are banned on enterprise networks, where connections are expensive resources. Nevertheless P2P computing still retains significant advantages in file transmission. A delivering file can get to its destination through P2P application, but in the same time, the communication/delivery of other networking applications will be blocked. The data delivered/communicated through applications other than P2P one might have very important means for the management/business. Therefore, to utilize efficient P2P application on enterprise network is ideal, but the flooding of the backbone network by P2P chunks must be controlled. Thus, a P2P file-sharing application that actively manages network traffic would be ideal for the enterprise networks. Here, a proactive P2P (EP2P) file-sharing application proposed by Liang et al. (2009) that the performance has been proved by mathematic analysis and computer simulation could be considered as the solution that proactively manages network traffic. The best way to evaluate the system performance is through the real implementation on the network. In this study, the unit transmission time and block rate are evaluated as parameters determining the performance and cost of different file-sharing applications through 500 times of experiments. The experimental results show that through controllable P2P application, the manager could manage the bandwidth consumption of backbone network. The EP2P could be considered by the companies concerning on the balance between delivery efficiency and networking-traffic load.