Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Social peer-to-peer and Tribler

I finally got to a fun paper I have been meaning to read for some time, "Tribler: A social-based peer-to-peer system" (PDF).

What is interesting about the paper is that it proposes a combination of social networking and P2P for content sharing that not only is designed to produce recommendations from friends and users with similar tastes in the network, but also uses those friend relationships to speed downloads, reduce free-riding, and encourage good behavior.

An excerpt:
Most current P2P file-sharing systems treat their users as anonymous, unrelated entities ... [Tribler is] a novel social-based P2P file-sharing paradigm that exploits social phenomena by maintaining social networks and using these in content discovery, content recommendations, and downloading.

Tribler performs content discovery and recommendation based on the notion of taste buddies, that is, users with the same tastes or interests .... The ... interface facilitate[s] the formation of social groups ... [which] may help reduce anti-social behavior.

A user invokes the help of his friends to speed up downloads ... Peers contribute their bandwidth by joining a swarm even if they are not interested in the content being distributed in this swarm ... [Past work assumed] sufficient altruism ... [which] makes ... [it] impractical ... Our [approach] solves this problem by introducing social-group incentives.
Tribler is an open source project. More information at tribler.org, especially on their research page.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cool to hear you like the Tribler research!

I'm coordinating the P2P research at Delft. The paper you read is already a bit outdated, we are working on this stuff with a team of 20 people.
Below are some shameful advertisements to recent work.

Linked to your pioneering Amazon work are probably:
Tag-based recommendation
and
Adverserial content search. We are seeing the problem of fake reviews, spam, false ratings on numerous websites. We are trying to advance P2P to deal with them in a zero-server manner:
4th Generation P2P with full self-organisation.

j.