Improving Gnutella network performance using synthetic coordinates

In this paper, we examine the behavior of the Gnutella peer-to-peer file sharing network and propose a protocol modification to improve its performance. Gnutella exhibits sub-optimal performance in terms of message latency because its overlay topology does not match the underlying physical network. In order to characterize Gnutella's performance, we modified an existing Gnutella simulation framework developed for the ns-2 network simulator to gather information about query and query hit propagation. We then modified the simulated protocol to use the Vivaldi synthetic coordinate system and to bias neighbor selection to favor nodes that are "close" in the Euclidean sense. Simulations with the adapted Gnutella protocol showed an improvement in both query and query hit propagation times.