UNIVERSITY OF CRETE
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

CS 554. Peer-to-Peer Systems

Lectures (Fall 2006): Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00-5:00 pm
Location: RA 203

Name E-mail Office Office Hours
Instructor: Mema Roussopoulou mema@eecs.harvard.edu G 215 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:00 pm
Teaching Assistant: Harris Papadakis adanar@csd.uoc.gr To Be Determined To Be Determined


Announcements

1) Please make sure you subscribe to the hy554 mailing list. We will use this list to make important announcements as the semester proceeds. See directions below for how to subscribe.



Course Description

Peer-to-peer systems have recently gained a lot of attention in the social, academic, and commercial communities. One of the early driving forces behind the peer-to-peer concept is that there are many PCs in homes and offices that lie idle for large chunks of time. Why not leverage these idle resources to do something useful, like share computation or share content? In fact, peer-to-peer systems have become synonymous with file-sharing systems as systems like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent have enjoyed explosive popularity over the last few years.

While file-sharing has been very successful, peer-to-peer systems are important and useful for more than just (illegal) sharing of song files. In this class, we will study peer-to-peer systems in depth to understand what they are, what they are good for, and how to improve them. The class will be primarily based on discussions of recent research papers on peer-to-peer systems. Topics include: routing, search, caching, security, reputation and trust, incentives, and applications.

This class is geared toward graduate students at all levels as well as advanced undergraduates (Computer Science 345 and Computer Science 335 are required).


Assignments

This course will involve reading papers, writing reviews for papers, participating in class discussions, presenting papers and leading class discussions, and a final exam.

Students will be required to write reviews for papers they read. Look here to get information on how to write a review. Reviews are due before each class by email. (Send these as a single email with "Review for Day/Month" in the subject line, where Day/Month is the current lecture date. Send the email to both the instructor (mema@eecs.harvard.edu) and the Teaching Assistant (adanar@csd.uoc.gr) Please send reviews in plain text.)

Students will actively participate in class discussions. For each paper, we will study the contribution of the paper, place this contribution in context of previous literature, critique the methodology used and the evaluation presented. Be prepared to come to class having read the paper carefully and ready to discuss questions or comments you have in detail.

In addition, students will present one or more papers and lead the discussion in the class. I will help you lead the discussion.

Note: NO LAPTOPS ALLOWED IN CLASS. You must have access to a printer so you may download, print copies of the papers (available below), and bring them to class for the discussions. I recommend you scribble directly on a paper any notes or questions that arise as you are reading. In fact, taking detailed notes on the paper and then reading through them before writing your review and before coming to class is a good idea. You are also welcome to send any questions about the paper to the staff before class if you feel shy asking about a particular detail in the paper.



Class Mailing List


Class mailing list: hy554-list@csd.uoc.gr . We will use this list to send out any important announcements, so please be sure to subscribe. You can subscribe to the mailing list by sending email to majordomo@csd.uoc.gr with a blank Subject line and a single line of text in the Body of the email stating: subscribe hy554-list



Grading


Reviews: 30%
Paper presentations: 15%
Class Participation: 15%
Final Exam: 40%



Syllabus & Schedule
(bibliography)


Date Topic Readings Presenter
3/10 Course Overview,
P2P Overview
-- No reading -- Roussopoulou
5/10 Routing A Scalable Content Addressable Network Roussopoulou
10/10 Routing Chord,
Serving DNS Using a Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service
Themistoklis Bourdenas (presentation)
12/10 Applications: PAN,
Applications: Vivaldi
A Directory Service for Perspective Access Networks
Vivaldi: A Decentralized Network Coordinate System
Giannis Georgalis (presentation)
17/10 No class due to elections -- No Reading -- N/A
19/10 No class due to elections -- No Reading -- N/A
24/10 Routing, Incentives Making Gnutella-like P2P Systems Scalable ,
Designing Incentives for Peer-to-Peer Routing
Giorgos Markakis (presentation)
26/10 Applications: Samsara Samsara: Honor Among Thieves in Peer-to-Peer Storage Michael Foukarakis (presentation)
31/10 Measurement Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Workload Antonis Bikakis (presentation)
2/11 Applications: LOCKSS Preserving Peer Replicas By Rate-Limited Sampled Voting
Katertzis Kostas (presentation)
7/11 No class -- Instructor at OSDI. Backup class on 16/1. -- No Reading -- N/A
9/11 No class -- Instructor at OSDI. Backup class on 18/1. -- No Reading -- N/A
14/11 Legal issues in P2P -- Papers moved to 21/11 and 5/12. See below for schedule adjustment
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law: A Primer for Developers ,
Are Contributions to P2P Technical Forums Private or Public Goods? - An Empirical Investigation
SPIES: Secret Protection Incentive-based Escrow System,
Markakis Giorgos, (presentation) Markakis Giorgos, (presentation) Giannis Georgalis (presentation)
16/11 Security -- Paper moved to 23/11
A Survey of Peer-to-Peer Security Issues
Michael Foukarakis (presentation)
21/11 Incentives Incentives Build Robustness in Bit Torrent
Faithfulness in Internet Algorithms
SPIES: Secret Protection Incentive-based Escrow System,
Kondylakis Xarhs (presentation), Kondylakis Xarhs (presentation), Giannis Georgalis (presentation)
23/11 Security The Sybil Attack ,
Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worms
A Survey of Peer-to-Peer Security Issues
Katertzis Kostas (presentation) , Kondylakis Xaris (presentation), Michael Foukarakis (presentation)
28/11 Reputation -- Paper moved to 30/11. Experience with an Object Reputation System for Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing , Vaggelis Mangas (presentation)
30/11 Applications: FreeHaven The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service
Experience with an Object Reputation System for Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing ,
Themistoklis Bourdenas (presentation), Vaggelis Mangas (presentation)
5/12 Applications: Tor
Reputation
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law: A Primer for Developers ,
Are Contributions to P2P Technical Forums Private or Public Goods? - An Empirical Investigation
Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router
Reputation in P2P Anonymity Systems
Giorgos Markakis (presentation), (presentation), (presentation), (presentation)
7/12 Incentives, Applications Robust Incentive Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks ,
P2P Content Search: Give the Web Back to the People
Themistoklis Bourdenas (presentation)
12/12 Applications: Skype An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol
An Experimental Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP System
Michael Foukarakis (presentation)
14/12 Applications: Pub-Sub for the Web, File-sharing Gossip-based Search Selection in Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Networks ,
Corona: A High Performance Publish-Subscribe System for the World Wide Web
Giannis Georgalis (presentation), (presentation)
19/12 Security Eclipse Attacks on Overlay Networks: Threats and Defenses ,
NetProfiler: Profiling Wide-Area Networks Using Peer Cooperation
Vaggelis Mangas (presentation), (presentation)
21/12 Applications: Information Retrieval Mercury: Supporting Scalable Multi-Attribute Range Queries
Antonis Bikakis (presentation),
9/1 Applications Experiences in building and operating ePOST, a reliable peer-to-peer application Vaggelis Mangas (presentation)
11/1 Incentives, Applications SWIFT: A System With Incentives For Trading ,
SmartSeer:Using a DHT to Process Continuous Queries over Peer-to-Peer Networks
Katertzis Kostas (presentation), (presentation)
16/1 Applications: Digital Libraries OverCite: A Distributed, Cooperative CiteSeer Kondylakis Xarhs (presentation)
18/1 Exploring Design Spaces,
2 P2P or Not 2 P2P?
Exploring the Design Space of Distributed and P2P Systems ,
2 P2P or Not 2 P2P?
Last day of class.
Antonis Bikakis (presentation)


Bibliography


Previous Years at Harvard University

Spring 2006
Spring 2005
Spring 2004