Enable Locality in BitTorrent like Networks

Locality, means that peers in the same or a close network are preferable to peers in distant networks. Since Internet traffic crossing many networks from Internet Service Providers (ISP) is generally expensive, keeping traffic local is desireable.  Locality in P2P networks is not exploited to the full extent possible today. The reasons for this are not evident but apparently existing solutions are not intergrated into popular P2P systems. One reason could be that most of those solutions use external centralized information services to determine network-distance between two IP addresses.

The goal of this thesis is to evaluate decentralized mechanisms to exploit locality in P2P networks. First, a set of metrics will be defined, such as Round Trip Time (RTT) or traceroutes. A prototype implementation will then be used in a lab environment (PlanetLab, Emanics Lab) to evaluate the performance of these metrics. 

Depending on the type of thesis (VA, BA, MA, MP) the workload will be adapted.