Naanou: A scalable, moderated P2P network

Student: Clint Heyer

Supervisor: Peter Sutton

Category: Information Environments Honours Project

With the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer networks, the communities formed within them are faced with new challenges. How is community order maintained with a completely decentralised system? What checks and balances can be put in place to maintain a stable cohesiveness among participants?

Naanou attempts to address one particular problem prevalent in existing P2P networks – ‘freeriding’. This is where one freerides on the generosity of other peers, without giving back any resources to the network. This behaviour breaks the fundamental distributed nature of P2P systems, by disproportionably loading the few nodes actively sharing resources. Naanou introduces a distributed moderation system within the context of a P2P filesharing network.

Naanou is a tuned implementation of the highly scaleable Chord protocol from MIT, and is the first application of this protocol in a more haphazard P2P environment, and one of the few P2P applications that use this class of distributed protocol.

Thesis Document (PDF)