Analysis of Peer-to-Peer networks from a dependability perspective

In the last few years, P2P systems have rapidly evolved and emerged as a promising platform to deploy new applications and services in the Internet. The main reasons for this is that P2P systems are self-organizing, have a decentralized nature, good scalability, efficient query search, and good resilience in the presence of node failures. However malicious faults (attacks) are serious threats in these systems. This paper analyzes and discusses dependability issues of four types P2P networks. Dependability issues include scalability, reliability, security, and availability. Simulation results confirm the dependability analysis. Results show that structured topologies are more tolerant against random faults but worse for malicious faults than unstructured topologies. The paper shows that the purely structured decentralized type (e.g. Chord) is the most dependable P2P network.