Icassp2003.com

Jin Li, Microsoft Research

Abstract

In both academia and industry, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have attracted great attention. Peer-to-peer file sharing applications, such as Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, BitTorrent, Skype and PPLive, have witnessed tremendous success among end users. And the P2P streaming applications, such as PPLive, UUSee, are on the rise. Recent statistics suggests that P2P traffic accounts for as much as 70% of Internet traffic. Unlike a client-server based system, peers bring with them serving capacity. Therefore, as the demand of a P2P system grows, the capacity of the network grows, too. This enables a P2P file sharing/streaming application to be cheap to build and superb in scalability.

The purpose of the tutorial is to examine issues associated with the successful building and deployment of an efficient and reliable P2P file sharing and/or P2P streaming application. We start by examining some popular P2P applications, such as BitTorrent, Skype and PPLive. The study of these P2P applications helps us to understand the design principles of P2P applications in general. We then investigate a number of tools for building successful P2P applications, such as the overlay network, the scheduling algorithm, the erasure resilient coding, and NAT/firewall traversal. Finally, we move on to critical deployment decisions that make or break the P2P applications, such as P2P economy, security issues in P2P application, peer selection, monitoring and debugging utilities in P2P application. The outline of the tutorial is described below.

1. P2P introduction
   • Overview
   • History of P2P development
2. Anatomy of popular P2P applications
   • BitTorrent: P2P file-sharing
   • Skype: P2P VoIP
   • PPLive: P2P streaming
   • Other P2P applications
   • Lesson learned from existing P2P deployment
3. Components and tools for P2P application
   • Overlay network
   • Scheduling algorithm
   • Erasure resilient coding (ERC)
   • NAT/Firewall traversal
4. P2P deployment issues
   • P2P economy: incentives in P2P network
   • Attacks of P2P application
   • Proximity and heterogeneity based peer selection
   • P2P monitoring tools and debugging aide
5. Summary

Targeted Audience

The course is an advanced tutorial intended for professionals, researchers and students interested in building P2P multimedia applications. We expect the audience to have basic knowledge of network programming.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Jin Li is currently a Principal Researcher in charge of P2P application at Microsoft Research, (Redmond, WA). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) in 1994. From 1994 to 1996, he served as a Research Associate at the University of Southern California (USC). From 1996 to 1999, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at the Sharp Laboratories of America (SLA), (Camas, WA), and represented the interests of SLA in the JPEG2000 and MPEG4 standardization efforts. He was a Project Leader at Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China) from 1999 to 2000. From 2000, Dr. Li has also served as an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, Tsinghua University (Beijing, China).

Dr. Li has 80+ referred conference and journal papers in a diversified research field, with interests cover audio/image/video compression, virtual environment and graphic compression, audio/video streaming, and real-time audio/video conferencing. His recent interest is in peer-to-peer applications. Dr. Li has personally built a number of P2P applications, such as P2P web hosting, P2P streaming and P2P distributed storage system. He was the driving force behind Microsoft’s strategy and application development in the peer-to-peer area. He is the lead guest editor of the special issue of “Content Storage and Delivery in Peer-to-Peer Networks” for IEEE Trans. on Multimedia and the guest editor of the special issue of “Advances in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems” for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication. He has organized a special session on “Peer-to-Peer Media Communication” for MMSP 2005, and has co-organized the workshop of “Advances in Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming” in ACM Multimedia 2005, and the workshop of “Recent Advances in Peer-to-Peer Streaming” in QShine 2006. He holds 18 issued US patents, with many more pending. Dr. Li is an Area Editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (Academic Press) and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He is a senior member of IEEE. He was the recipient of the 1994 Ph.D. thesis award from Tsinghua University and the 1998 Young Investigator Award from SPIE Visual Communication and Image Processing.