Speaker
Dr
Supriya Krishnamurthy
(SICS)
Description
Overlay networks are application-level networks, or networks
of acquaintances, established on top of physical networks,
such as the Internet. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are one
class of overlay networks, in which all nodes in the system
are equivalent and all tasks are carried out without the
presence of any central authority. Despite their relatively
short history, peer-to-peer overlays are now deployed in a
multitude of new and highly popular applications. There has
hence been an immense amount of interest in the research
community to classify and understand the performance
implications of all the design choices available for the
construction of such networks, keeping in mind the specific
problems they face: namely very high dynamism, lack of
control, arbitrary geographical location of the constituent
peers and differing bandwidth capabilities. In this talk,
we describe our own (physics-based) approach to thinking
about these issues.
